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From Salesforce drama to the year of generative AI
Apologies to the Grateful Dead , but what a long , strange class it ’s been in 2023 endeavour technical school news . It began with a long ton ofSalesforce dramaand eventually got look at over by generative AI and ChatGPT , which seemed to fall out of nowhere to completely dominate the intelligence cycle this year .
But even though AI clearly influence much of the newsworthiness , and even my own insurance coverage , there was still a short ton of other initiative stories that made the news this year .
The rise of generative AI in the enterprise
It would be impossible to discuss this year ’s news program cycle without tattle about the wallop of productive AI . When OpenAI released ChatGPT at the last of last twelvemonth , it would have been impossible to understand the impact it would have on initiative software in the coming month . Yet it has the likely tobe rightfully transformative , change the mode we interact with computer software , and perhaps constitute the biggest change to UX ( substance abuser experience ) design since compass point - and - click .
Just about every go-ahead package company announced its purpose to build up productive AI interactivity into the interface , and we should start to see those effort come to fruition in 2024 . The big interrogation around this will be how well they carry out it , how much it be to use the young feature , what the charge model await like , if it adds significant value to the user experience and if people rightfully use these features .
Salesforce’s early-year troubles
This class was a story of two different year for Salesforce . The company started the year witha short ton of trouble , from the red of key executives like co - CEOBret Taylorand Slack chief operating officer and co - founderStewart Butterfield , abig layoff , an influx ofactivist investorsand oodles of big news . However , revenue grew 14 % for the first earnings report in March , then grew a consistent 11 % from fourth part to quarter for the remaining three quarter of the class , and it is ending the year with the stock up 97 % .
The company ’s problems dominated our coverage with 19 stories between November 2022 and the goal of March 2023 . Among the thing we will be watching in the coming yr : Will Salesforce continue to come up stability in 2024 , are the layoffs and cost - cutting over , and can the company increase receipts growth without additional acquisitions ?
Tech layoffs
Thetech layoffsdominated the former part of the twelvemonth and obdurately persisted into recent months . Microsoft , Salesforce , Alphabet and Amazon lay off tens of G of people , using the apology they had hired too many employees during the pandemic , catch the charge to the swarm as more lasting than it proved to be .
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We looked at the numbers behind the layoffs , particularly for technical school worker such as engineers and IT pro , and found that those employeescontinued to observe work . Other roles struggled , however , and when the layoffs started up anew in recent month , we explore the reason . Will the trend continue in 2024 , or will the cost - cutting that led to these layoffs in the end be over ?
AWS chasing Microsoft in AI
AWS , which has master swarm calculation since itinvented the conceptin 2006 , catch its growth slow jolly dramatically in 2023 with a worrisome downward trend from 20 % to 16 % to 12 % to 12 % again . While part of that could be explain by a general slowdown in cloud spending and the law of large numbers , it was for sure not directionally what the largest cloud seller was hoping to see in 2023 .
Meanwhile , Microsoft appeared to master the moveto generative AI , mostly through its strategic and fiscal partnership with OpenAI . While Amazon announced a lot of key moves — include novel products and partnerships around generative AI in the final months of the year — it feel like it wasplaying snap - up .
One of the stories to watch in 2024 is whether Microsoft ’s perceive point start will translate into market dominance , or if it is genuinely early days and Amazon and others still have metre to catch up .
OpenAI drama
When OpenAI release the GPT-4 large spoken communication fashion model at the end of last class , followed by ChatGPT , I do n’t think anybody run into the wallop these firing would have both on mainstream perceptual experience of the power of AI and the impact on software in general .
Perhaps that ’s why everyone was so shocked when theboard suddenly firedfounder and CEO Sam Altman in November . The whole situationwas eventually resolvedafter a rather tenacious workweek , and Altman and his partner Greg Brockman returned to operate the companionship . But it left loiter questions around what led to the conclusion to fire him and what wallop it would have , if any , on the company ’s reputation and momentum going into the new year .
Nvidia’s monster year
One company that benefited greatly from the rise in generative AI ( see how often I keep repeat that ? ) was chipmaker Nvidia . It saw increasing demand for its GPUs , which help power the breeding of large language models . Consider that the four quarterly reports in 2023 went from $ 6 billion in Q4 2023 in February , to $ 7 billion in Q1 2024 in May , to $ 13.5 billion in Q2 in August to $ 18 billion in November . That’squite a rising .
One of the storylines to watch in 2024 is whether Nvidia can keep up the stride of this kind of monster maturation because typically , that grade of emergence is challenging to support . Justask Zoom .
The drop in enterprise M&A
The list oftop 10 enterprise M&Adeals for 2023 saw a big drop - off in full deal value from the last couple of years . The reasons were many : high-pitched interestingness rates ; a tighter regulative surroundings ; and the big , extremely acquisitive company staying mostly on the sideline . As the yr closed , there was a lowly uptick in deals , but other thanCisco acquiring Splunkfor $ 28 billion , the year was mostly quiet by recent standards .
One of the big questions for 2024 is whether M&A will return to the tier we ’ve envision over the previous few year , or whether it will persist relatively still .
