Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, host Giuseppe Ianni, Cloud Wars Analyst and thought leader, sits down with Bob McAdam, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Tasklet and a Programming Committee member for the 2026 AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA. Together, they explore how AI has evolved from hype to hands-on reality, what attendees can expect at this year’s summit, and why practical, ERP-focused use cases are now top of mind for partners and end users alike.Key TakeawaysFrom Talk to Tangible Value: AI conversations have evolved rapidly over the past year, and McAdam emphasizes that organizations are now demanding proof of value. Businesses no longer want abstract discussions about Copilots—they want to see how agents improve ERP workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and drive measurable efficiency. This shift reflects a broader maturity in the market, where curiosity has turned into expectation.Session Selection Beyond the Buzzwords: As a Programming Committee member, McAdam looks for sessions that go deeper than hype. He values speakers who bring specificity—manufacturing, distribution, documentation, or customer service—rather than generic AI narratives. Even “unsexy” topics like process documentation earn a place because of their real-world importance.AI as a Career Accelerator: The conversation highlights that AI adoption isn’t just about company transformation—it’s also about individual growth. Many attendees come to the summit to build personal competitive advantage, learning skills and mental models they can apply immediately. Experimenting with AI in personal workflows often becomes the gateway to professional adoption. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I break down why Google Cloud now tops the Cloud Wars Top 10.Highlights00:08 — This week we have named Google Cloud as the new number one company on the Cloud Wars Top 10. Oracle has risen to number two. Microsoft slides down to number three. Microsoft’s held that top spot for four years. It’s three times bigger than Google Cloud, but there’s much more that goes into the Cloud Wars Top 10 than size alone.01:30 — We’ve got coming up a video with John Siefert, our CEO, and also a detailed article that looks at a lot of the key indicators behind Google Cloud’s rise, points to some of the challenges Microsoft has faced, and also mentions how Oracle, too, has moved up here because it is doing more of what customers need to be successful in the AI Economy.02:06 — Thomas Kurian has just done a phenomenal job. When Kurian started, he said, “I need to triple the size of our sales organization.” So, while Google Cloud's always had great technology, its connection to customers and its way of engaging with customers was something that Kurian pretty much had to build from scratch.02:57 — I think Microsoft’s cloud revenues, relative to Oracle, are seven times bigger, but it’s more than that. Who’s leading the innovation agenda? Who is taking these new ideas forward? Who is helping customers adapt quickly, transform quickly, and become the sort of companies they’re going to need to be to succeed and win in the AI Economy?03:46 — When I started, a lot of people said, “You can’t compare an infrastructure company to an applications company.” I said, “Sure, I can.” I felt that often these lists of who the leaders are in different markets or categories were driven by Silicon Valley, inside-the-industry perspectives. Here, I’ve tried to take a look at it for these nine years from the point of view of customers.04:24 — And I think in this case, regardless of the size differential, Google Cloud is doing more on both cloud and AI. I think about what Oracle’s done to be able to come up to number two. A handful of years ago, Oracle said, “We’re going full force into the cloud infrastructure business. We’re going to become a hyperscaler.” Many so-called experts said that’s crazy.05:01 — Yet, Oracle has built a huge and fast-growing business out of that. Okay, again, going back a handful of years, there were people who said AWS is the number one company. It’s the king of the cloud. Nobody will ever be able to touch it or displace it. Well, Microsoft did that. Nobody owns first place. It’s a temporary lease.06:03 — It’s now Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft as the top three companies. We’ll give you lots more details on who’s in the number four through number ten spots going forward over the next week or two, and then within that and going forward, deeper analyses of each company and where they stand. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at the continued strength of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership, despite past tensions, through the launch of GPT-5.2.Highlights00:12 — Microsoft has announced the general availability of OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 in Microsoft Foundry. It stated that introducing a new frontier model series, purposefully built to meet the needs of enterprise developers and technical leaders, is setting a new standard for a new era.00:39 — The GPT-5.2 series boasts deeper logical reasoning, richer context handling, and better execution for agentic AI tasks. The GPT-5.2 series’ advanced reasoning means that it takes less effort to achieve more, all the while providing better safety and guardrails. Microsoft is pushing the adoption of the GPT-5.2 series as a way for developers to supercharge their agentic AI efforts.01:35 — A few months ago, when it seemed that the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft was deteriorating, it would have been a significant setback if the company’s models weren’t continually integrated into the Microsoft developer ecosystem. However, that has not been the case, which is a testament to the continued collaborative nature of the AI Revolution. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I connect the dots between tech disruption and retail transformation.Highlights00:15 — We see now the true emergence from what I’ve called for a long time the AI Revolution, now into the AI Economy. NVIDIA, with a strategic partnership with Mercedes-Benz, is not just Mercedes-Benz using a little bit of NVIDIA’s software inside its new cars. It's calling it an AI-driven car. Google then also stepped outside of the tech industry to buy an energy firm.01:15 — Could it be the merging of the energy and the tech industries here to provide the power behind AI? Next week there’ll be the giant National Retail Federation show. I suspect that, you know, 80 or 90% of the announcements there will be about new technology and AI and cloud being used to revolutionize and further stimulate innovation and growth in the retail sector.03:31 — So I think what we’ll see here throughout 2026 — it’s been a busy first week or so in here — we’re going to see the entire global economy rocked by these changes, as AI is infused into every facet of what businesses are doing, and the AI providers and cloud providers begin to move laterally and, in some cases, aggressively into different markets here.04:30 — We’ve seen the pace of these massive, disruptive revolutions — upheavals in business cycles — go from, you know, centuries to decades to years. And to the leadership — not only in the tech companies that I cover, but in their customers — has to be one where, you know, the enemy here is time. There’s no chance to sit back, play it safe, wait and see what my competitors do.05:06 — They’ll get the first-mover status, but I’ll come in with a smarter approach. I just — I think those days are over. We’ve got a long article coming up about this on CloudWars.com that goes into more detail and offers lots of examples of what I’ve touched on here today. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

Bonnie Tinder is the founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence, an independent B2B peer review site that amplifies the voice of the customer. She focuses on software customers, consulting partners, and software vendors and helps identify the best partners for their needs. In this episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bonnie and Bob explore why AI success hinges far more on implementation than hype. As the AI economy moves from experimentation to everyday business reality, Bonnie shares research-backed insights from hundreds of enterprise HR projects showing that poorly executed implementations quietly derail AI value.Episode 57 | Implementation Before IntelligenceThe Big Themes:Implementation Determines AI Value: AI success is not driven by algorithms alone — it is directly tied to the quality of enterprise software implementation. Analysis of 500 HR projects shows a strong correlation between implementation effectiveness and AI-driven business outcomes. Organizations with successful implementations realized nearly twice the value from AI initiatives compared to those with partial or failed rollouts.Data Readiness Is the Biggest Barrier: The most common reason AI initiatives fail is insufficient data maturity. Clean, standardized, and integrated datasets — particularly across HR, finance, and operations — are essential. Disparities between systems like payroll, talent management, and time tracking undermine AI effectiveness. Enterprises with unified data architectures unlock far greater AI value because insights can flow across the business, enabling agents and analytics to operate holistically rather than in silos.Process Discipline Is Rewarded: AI rewards disciplined organizations and punishes undisciplined ones. Well-defined workflows, governance structures, and operational rigor enable AI to perform as intended. Without them, AI exposes inefficiencies and compounds chaos. This explains why AI often “fails” during implementation rather than in production. The technology is rarely the issue, organizational readiness is. AI simply shines a spotlight on how well the business actually runs.The Big Quote: “AI does not replace process discipline. It rewards it."More from Bonnie Tinder:Connect with Bonnie on LinkedIn. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

Key TakeawaysAdoption approach: Successful adoption of AI requires not only technical implementation but also strong data governance, strategic initiatives, and enterprise-level practices, explains Simms. While there is great potential across business solutions, challenges like hallucinations and poor adoption highlight the need for structured approaches and diverse expertise.Session selection: As a member of the Programming Committee Board, Simms explained his thinking behind evaluating session submissions. When reviewing session proposals, he looked for submissions that addressed essential issues for the data platform and went beyond technology alone to include governance, change management, and user adoption.Adapating with new tech: Technology evolves in 2–3 year cycles, notes Simms, making continuous skill updates essential, but AI highlights underlying data and process issues that can no longer be hidden. Success requires a solid foundation, strategic vision, clear requirements, and fixing data quality at the source to ensure use cases deliver meaningful results.Final thoughts: In closing, Simms expresses his excitement for the event and encourages attendees to participate in the Golf Invitational. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why private-data inferencing may be the next trillion-dollar AI marketHighlights00:28 — Larry Ellison's grand AI plan for 2026 is centered on the holy grail for CEOs, boards of directors, and business leaders. They’re looking to unlock the power of all their data for AI reasoning and inferencing. Oracle’s promise is that Oracle’s solutions are going to allow companies to be able to reason and do inferencing on all of their private data, and to do so very securely.01:24 — Here are the pieces that he said are going to come together for this: the existing Oracle databases and all the data that’s in them plus now the new Oracle AI Database. They’ve got their Oracle Applications, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. All of those pieces are coming together.02:59 — We’ve all heard about training AI models. He said that is a spectacularly huge and fast-growing business. But, he said, when you then take that away from training the models and get it into the corporate world, to be able to do the reasoning over and inferencing on private corporate data, he said that’s an even bigger market than training AI models.03:24 — And he said Oracle is going to be right in the thick of these two — the largest and fastest-growing markets in history — now in the Cloud Wars. Oracle, I believe, has taken the lead position in saying, “We cannot just outline it and describe it. We can do it. We can deliver it, and we can do that now.” This is where Ellison has helped to distinguish Oracle from all other competitors.04:08 — He’s done this for the last half century, and I think at this point, with some of the different pieces he’s put together, we’ve got to position Oracle as the leader — at least right now — in enabling the fulfilment of this Holy Grail, where companies are able to unlock and unleash the power of all of their data for AI applications and AI purposes, leading the way into the AI economy. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I share how big tech and Edtech are aligning to meet the challenges of rapid change.Highlights00:03 — IBM and Pearson have announced a partnership to create personalized learning products powered by AI. These products are designed for a wide range of businesses, public organizations, and educational institutions. Pearson aims to utilize watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx Governance to develop these products. Additionally, IBM will create a custom AI-powered learning platform.00:47 —Moreover, IBM will also deliver Pearson solutions to its customers and employees. The two companies are also exploring tools to help verify the capabilities of AI agents. Omar Abbosh, CEO of Pearson, explained that, together with IBM, the company was building trusted AI-powered learning tools that will help people and organizations thrive in a world of constant change.01:36 — This is a great example of the flexibility and multifaceted nature of the AI Era, where companies form strategic partnerships not only to get a product out there and to market, but also to share expertise on new tools and systems. These collaborations help boost understanding and adoption of AI Visit Cloud Wars for more.

Key TakeawaysReflections: Grant reflects on last year's AI Agent & Copilot Summit, acknowledging the in-depth learning opportunities given the newness of AI at the time. Although it was the first year, he says it "felt like a really mature conference." The upcoming AI Agent & Copilot Summit can enable attendees to dig deeper into "how we actually accomplish things as a business, as an organization, and even as individuals.Session considerations: Looking forward to the event in March, Grant is excited to attend various sessions. He finds sessions on Microsoft products interesting as well as sessions that provide an individual point of view. "I'll look at the content of a session, but I look almost equally as much at the speaker to think about, 'What is this person like? What's their perspective in the world and on business? And how are they using this in a way that other people aren't yet?' I think that's where we start hitting and tapping on innovation."Learning from insights: AI Agent & Copilot Summit speakers come to the event prepared to share their experiences and expertise with attendees. Grant outlines what topics attendees might expect and what sessions he submitted to speak at the event. "The world is changing by the minute, and I think it's important for us to go into this eyes wide open and think about what we're doing right and how we're doing it. It matters," he states. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore what ServiceNow’s potential $7B acquisition of Armis could mean for its cybersecurity strategy and its customers.Highlights00:06 — According to recent reports, ServiceNow is in advanced talks to acquire Armis, with more details expected to be announced in the coming days. Coverage from Bloomberg suggests that the deal could be worth up to $7 billion. I want to discuss what the introduction of Armis to the ServiceNow ecosystem could mean for customers.00:34 — Armis is a cyber exposure management and security company. The company's technology protects the integrity of an organization's attack surface and manages cyber risk exposure in real time. The company's flagship platform, Armis Centrix, is an AI-enhanced, cloud-native security solution that monitors an organization's digital attack surface.01:07 — If this deal goes ahead at the reported price, it would be by far the largest acquisition in ServiceNow's history. The addition of AI-enhanced cybersecurity tools that not only consistently monitor but also provide real-time priority protection would significantly boost ServiceNow's existing security capabilities.  Visit Cloud Wars for more.