Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: why experiments with enterprise AI apps are increasingly moving outside corporate walls, how a really weird glitch almost took down the internet, and this week's enterprise moves.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: why experiments with enterprise AI apps are increasingly moving outside corporate walls, how a really weird glitch almost took down the internet, and this week's enterprise moves.
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SEATTLE — While consumer-oriented AI devices and apps still feel like a solution looking for a problem, business customers have different needs and expectations when interacting with their suppliers. Now that companies have had over a year to kick the tires on enterprise AI app-building services, this could be the year that businesses who preferred to keep those initial experiments in-house gain the confidence to change how they interact with customers.
That's according to Microsoft's John Montgomery, corporate vice president for program management in Azure AI. "I would say a year ago, most of the builds that we were seeing were inward facing. Now we're increasingly seeing ones … where they are very much customer-facing," he said in an interview at Microsoft Build.
However, companies like Vodafone and H&R Block "are the most sophisticated customers," he said. If Microsoft expects to see its AI investments pay off, it will need to get the rest of the corporate world to roll out external-facing AI apps without fear of damaging their relationships with customers.
Microsoft had "a couple hundred" customers using AI in production in January 2023, when Azure Open AI became generally available, Montgomery said. Now it has 53,000 customers using its AI services across Azure, which is incredible growth but a relatively small portion of its business: for example, Satya Nadella said on its last earnings call that 330,000 Microsoft customers used AI tools across its Power Platform.
No one seems to understand why a crucial link in the system that allows computers to find each other on the internet fell out of sync with its partners for several days this week, which could have made the whole thing difficult to use if left unchecked. Ars Technica has a detailed overview of the problem, which involved one of the 13 root servers at the lowest levels of the internet.
Those 13 servers help operate the DNS protocol, which allows your computer to find the specific server that hosts runtime.news when you type it into a browser. For some reason, one of those 13 servers operated by Cogent stopped updating its records as changes were made to the other 12 servers, a process that in normal times is pretty much instantaneous.
The slow root server was a whole three days behind the other 12, according to the engineer who first flagged the issue on Tuesday, which means it missed a lot of changes. The issue was fixed by the end of the day on Wednesday, and it looks like the glue that holds the popsicle sticks together at the core of the modern internet will make it through the holiday weekend.
Luis Blando is the new chief product and technology officer at OutSystems, joining the low-code company after four years at Proofpoint.
Chris Conley is the new chief revenue officer at Evocative, following several years in sales roles at data-center operations rival Centersquare.
Krishna Rao is the new chief financial officer at Anthropic, after serving in a similar role for Fanatics Commerce.
Nvidia made a lot of money.
Snowflake also enjoyed a strong quarter, beating Wall Street expectations and raising its guidance for the full year.
But Workday cut its expectations for yearly subscription revenue, citing weaker-than-expected hiring among its customers and therefore less demand for new seats.
Canva launched an enterprise version of its design tool, which comes with storage and security features as well as indemnification for projects generated with its AI tools.
Ascension continues to grapple with a ransomware attack from earlier this month, with delays in patient treatment and record-keeping on paper, according to The New York Times.
Thanks for reading — Runtime is off for the holiday weekend, see you Tuesday!