Abe Froman

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@jasonlk Ridiculous take. If you are a master at your craft, even if taking a year to pursue something else, you will always come back as a master of your craft or better.

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@jasonlk 100%

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@paulg @chetanp It’s a stretch to think these global law firms will switch back and forth with legal AI vendors. Switching and training costs are high. Being first has significant weight.

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@pierreeliottlal Connector

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise.

Some quick takeaways:

* Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to agents that use tools, process data, and start to execute real work in the enterprise. Complementing this, enterprises are often evolving from “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to adoption to targeted automation efforts applied to specific areas of work and workflow.

* Change management still will remain one of the biggest topics for enterprises. Most workflows aren’t setup to just drop agents directly in, and enterprises will need a ton of help to drive these efforts (both internally and from partners). One company has a head of AI in every business unit that roles up to a central team, just to keep all the functions coordinated.

* Tokenmaxxing! Most companies operate with very strict OpEx budgets get locked in for the year ahead, so they’re going through very real trade-off discussions right now on how to budget for tokens. One company recently had an idea for a “shark tank” style way of pitching for compute budget. Others are trying to figure out how to ration compute to the best use-cases internally through some hierarchy of needs (my words not theirs).

* Fixing fragmented and legacy systems remain a huge priority right now. Most enterprises are dealing with decades of either on-prem systems or systems they moved to the cloud but that still haven’t been modernized in any meaningful way. This means agents can’t easily tap into these data sources in a unified way yet, so companies are focused on how they modernize these.

* Most companies are *not* talking about replacing jobs due to agents. The major use-cases for agents are things that the company wasn’t able to do before or couldn’t prioritize. Software upgrades, automating back office processes that were constraining other workflows, processing large amounts of documents to get new business or client insights, and so on. More emphasis on ways to make money vs. cut costs.

* Headless software dominated my conversations. Enterprises need to be able to ensure all of their software works across any set of agents they choose. They will kick out vendors that don’t make this technically or economically easy.

* Clear sense that it can be hard to standardize on anything right now given how fast things are moving. Blessing and a curse of the innovation curve right now - no one wants to get stuck in a paradigm that locks them into the wrong architecture. One other result of this is that companies realize they’re in a multi-agent world, which means that interoperability becomes paramount across systems.

* Unanimous sense that everyone is working more than ever before. AI is not causing anyone to do less work right now, and similar to Silicon Valley people feel their teams are the busiest they’ve ever been.

One final meta observation not called out explicitly. It seems that despite Silicon Valley’s sense that AI has made hard things easy, the most powerful ways to use agents is more ���technical” than prior eras of software. Skills, MCP, CLIs, etc. may be simple concepts for tech, but in the real world these are all esoteric concepts that will require technical people to help bring to life in the enterprise.

This both means diffusion will take real work and time, but also everyone’s estimation of engineering jobs is totally off. Engineers may not be “writing” software, but they will certainly be the ones to setup and operate the systems that actually automate most work in the enterprise.

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@starrrways @ScooterCasterNY Very strong here in northern Westchester

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@itsalexvacca Prompt

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@aschwags3 GA

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@JJEnglert Gtm guide

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@AlfieJCarter Claude

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@Mike_Scully_ AI

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@Zephyr_hg NEWS

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@Zephyr_hg NEWS

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@Tesla @elonmusk the Beta version of Grok chatbot in a Tesla curses relentlessly sh*t, f*ck etc. I have young kids in my car. Please improve the guidelines to prevent it from cursing. Thx 🙏

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@MartyMacn @curious_founder Climate change increasing weather damage to homes resulting in significant costs to insurers.

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@curious_founder Not sure where you are getting this data but looks like it’s undercounting data center water usage. It’s been reported that some counties have 10% of water used by datacenters.

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@RobAstorino Yes felt in armonk

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@toyscreen @alhawadeth Yes felt it

[Abe Froman @sforman]

@nwadeema Just felt something

[Abe Froman @sforman]

⁦@nytimes⁩ claiming the US Navy is engaging in its fiercest fighting since WWII. Any military historians in X want to verify this? Seems unlikely