It has been another whirlwind time for theCUBE coverage, with Red Hat Summit, RSA Conference and Boomi World now in the books, and events such as Dell Technologies World and Informatica World kicking off today.

It was a monster week, with plenty for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) to discuss on the latest episode of the CUBE podcast. Perhaps the biggest news of the week was that Amazon Web Services Inc. CEO Adam Selipsky would step down, to be replaced by longtime AWS executive Matt Garman. It all happened very fast, according to Furrier.

“In the middle of the pandemic, Amazon was expanding super fast. They were deploying a ton of revenue from call centers,” he said. “Just growth. The zero interest rate kicked in; they had then the cost-cutting, all that was going on.”

Selipsky managed that well. But then the AI wave hit, and he just missed it, Furrier noted.

“I think this was a case where Adam was overwhelmed and the team was overwhelmed by the fact that they could not move fast enough to meet the AI wave in the eye of public opinion,” he said. “This is a classic case, but they were just exposed. They just could not put the clothes on fast enough.”

Microsoft Corp. moved faster, and it became clear that this was AI wartime. At the end of the day, Selipsky was playing too much defense and not enough offense, according to Furrier.

“Look at their announcements. They’ve been confusing, disjointed,” he said. “Now, they’ve been much better over the past six months, I’ve got to say. Matt was out in the field. Now, it’s time to crank it up. We’ll see. It’s game on. It’s wartime.”

Still, it doesn’t mean it’s time to take cheap shots at Selipsky, according to Furrier. It’s not as though he did a bad job with AI.

“It just was the classic case of ‘The Godfather.’ It’s time for a wartime consigliere,” he said.

Lots to consider as the AI wars rage on

Though Microsoft may be in the lead in the AI wars, it is possible to compete with them, according to Vellante. They’re making great moves, but that’s not the whole story.

“They’re Microsoft. They’ve got their software estate. It is what it is, and it’s awesome. At the same time, it’s not,” Vellante said. “My concern, if I were Amazon, would be Google. The data suggests this. The data shows that Google’s AI is rapidly catching up. Their AI momentum is rapidly catching up with that of AWS.”

Last week, OpenAI announced a new flagship AI model named GPT-4o with real-time multimodal capabilities. It’s very impressive, according to Furrier.

“[You can] communicate with voice in real time. It just goes to show you what’s coming,” he said.

OpenAI made the announcement on the doorstep of Google I/O, an event that included more than a hundred announcements. Though Google’s presentation was remarkable, OpenAI had a better demo, according to Furrier.

“OpenAI did a live demo. That was different. So, again, parsing through that, that’s a real big deal,” Furrier said. “It shows the lead on OpenAI, but Google’s coming back.”

AI narrows consumer-enterprise technology gap

Overall, it’s likely that competition is going to heat up as companies fight for consumers. Recently, Furrier spoke with a company’s team of 40 about their enterprise.

“I said, the consumer side of the business is where all the action is. Google, Amazon. That’s where Broadcom and the Nvidias of the world are supplying all their chips,” he said. “But it’s the enterprise … and the power law of these models is where the action is for the enterprise.”

This wave of technology is often compared to the web wave. But during the web wave, the enterprise lagged the consumer side by five years or more, according to Furrier.

“Whatever happened in the consumer happened in the enterprise five years or more later. Not here, not in AI,” he said.

The lag is months in consumer to enterprise, according to Furrier. However, the interesting thing is that the data in the enterprise side is actually well-positioned for AI to be more reliable, he added.

“What I mean by that is that the hallucinations we see on the large language foundation models are there because the corpus is so big, the data sets are so big,” he said. “When you start getting into the specialty models and these enterprises, they’re tightly coupled data sets. It’s good data. It’s their data; it’s proprietary to the company. I think you’re going to see a lot more new ways to wrangle that data for AI.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Adam Selipsky, outgoing CEO of AWS
Matt Garman, incoming CEO of AWS, beginning June 3
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Charlie Bell, EVP for security, compliance, identity and management at Microsoft
Teresa Carlson, president and CMO of Flexport
Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon
Mary Camarata, VP of global corporate marketing at MongoDB
Mike Clayville, board member and investor, former AWS executive
Raejeanne Skillern, VP and CMO of AWS
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO at Microsoft
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
Warren Buffet, chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway
Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake
Matt Wood, VP of analytics, business intelligence and machine learning at AWS
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AI and data at AWS
Sarbjeet Johal, founder and CEO of Stackpane
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Charlie Kawwas, president at Broadcom
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Jas Tremblay, GM for data center solutions group at Broadcom
Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle
Christian Kleinerman, SVP of product at Snowflake
Rachel Thornton, CMO of Fivetran
Eric Herzog, CMO of Infinidat
Justin Borgman, chairman and CEO of Starburst Data
Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe
Kara Swisher, journalist
Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO of ServiceNow
A.M. (Toni) Sacconaghi, Jr., managing director and senior research analyst for US IT hardware and electric vehicles at Bernstein Research

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Photo: SiliconANGLE