The big event no one could ignore last week was Thursday night’s televised debate between U.S. President Joe Biden and ex-president Donald Trump. The election’s implications for the technology sector was one of the subjects of conversation for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) to dive into on the latest episode of the CUBE podcast, along with the new trend of agentic AI and Amazon.com Inc.’s new valuation.

The performance of Biden and Trump in the debate calls for a new generation of leadership, according to Furrier. That’s especially pronounced in the wake of massive technological leaps.

“[The new generation has] to take control of the… new issues in government.  How government is using technology,” Furrier said, adding that the subject came up during the week’s AWS Summit Washington, DC. “Generative AI is changing public-private partnerships. Healthcare is impacted, because now you’ve got government-mandated stuff. Then, you’ve got private sector. We are in a major transformation on government.”

The moderators of the debate did an effective job in managing the conversation, according to Furrier. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that artificial intelligence will also upend much of how media functions.

“I think the old-school media’s gotta go. Because now you have multiple sources, you have multiple ways to get data,” Furrier said. “I think you’re going to see the new generation, the GameStop generation, I call it. They’re going to source things differently. I think this is going to change the game a little bit.”

Agentic AI is on the horizon

While generative AI has set the world on fire, it hasn’t yet done the same for enterprise ROI. While it’s doing things like writing better marketing content and improving customer service, it’s not throwing off huge net present values, according to Vellante.

“We think the next wave of AI uses gen AI, but it’s this thing, this buzzword you’ve probably heard, called agentic AI, where agents are acting in concert,” Vellante said. “They’re working with other agents to actually perform, not just a specific task, but a series of tasks to develop a plan and present plans.”

Agentic AI has human supervision. But it also involves some degree of autonomy, according to Vellante.

“Go out, make a plan, interact with other agents, understand the dependencies on those other agents to harmonize the data, and then present a plan back to a professional,” Vellante said. “We see these essentially digital factories being built, where workflows are much more highly automated.”

There are digital representations of the business, people, places and things, according to Vellante. That could mean cutting a lot of the waste that’s in business today.

“We think that’s the next wave of AI … we think it’s coming,” Vellante said.

Amazon hits $2 trillion valuation

This week, Amazon became the fifth company to reach a valuation of $2 trillion in the stock market. It came after a period in which people were calling for the head of Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy, Vellante noted.

“We were like, ‘Are you out of your mind? This guy’s one of the most competent.’ When you do interviews on theCUBE, you really get a good sense as to who the top players are, the tech athletes,” he said. “He’s top of the top.”

The $2 trillion market cap is an accomplishment, but the company is still behind by a trillion dollars to Microsoft Corp. That poses a question as to whether Amazon can get to a $3 trillion valuation, according to Furrier.

“With Jassy at the helm, he’s only a couple of years in, AWS is still throwing up most of the profits,” Furrier said. “Azure, not even as strong of a cloud as AWS, but Amazon’s got the retail baggage. Can Amazon get the cash flow and generate a business model as good as Microsoft?”

A software business model with marginal economics that go to zero with volume is generally a better business model than reselling every good in the world, Vellante noted. That doesn’t mean that Amazon’s retail business isn’t exceptional.

“It’s amazing, the vectors, the levers that they can turn. What they’re doing in advertising. Thursday Night Football has been a home run. Not to mention AWS, despite some of the challenges that AWS has, it’s a fantastic business,” Vellante said. “But I’ll say, Microsoft’s a better business, just from a business model standpoint and a financial standpoint, because it’s software.”

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

Joe Biden, 46th United States president
Donald Trump, 45th U.S. president
Kamala Harris, U.S. vice president
Rick Reilly, sportswriter, author, screenwriter, speaker
Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director
Gavin Newsom, governor of California
Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan
Joe Manchin, U.S. Senator
Anderson Cooper, news anchor at CNN
Patrick Joseph McGovern, American businessman
John F. Kennedy, 35th U.S. president
Richard Nixon, 37th U.S. president
George Carlin, late comedian
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Steve Forbes, American publisher and executive
Barack Obama, 44th U.S. president
Oprah Winfrey, American host and television producer
Tom Curry, cloud security consultant at Google
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
Charlie Kawwas, president at Broadcom
Jon Turow, partner at Madrona Venture Group
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO at OpenAI
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Christophe Bertrand, practice director of data management and analytics at Enterprise Strategy Group
Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Paul Maritz, chairman at Pivotal Software and former CEO of VMware
Andy Jassy, president and CEO at Amazon
George Gilbert, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services at VMware by Broadcom
Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware
Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo

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Photo: SiliconANGLE