The challenge for any reporter covering the enterprise technology world this year was keeping pace with the tidal wave of change engulfing the industry. Artificial intelligence has turbocharged a tech ecosystem that was already moving fast, and its impact could be felt in nearly every story of consequence during 2024.

There was no shortage of commentary about AI and other related topics, as found in the many interviews on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, and SiliconANGLE’s ongoing news coverage of major tech events. Here are a few of the more memorable quotes from one reporter’s notebook in 2024:

“What do we automate? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: What don’t we automate?” — Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon.com Inc., during his keynote appearance at AWS re:Invent in December.

“What’s going on in the industry today hasn’t happened in 60 years. You must find a way to turn that flywheel of your company’s experience into AI. The era of generative AI is here.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaking at HPE Discover in June.

“AI has jumped the shark when you have A-listers like George Lucas going to the keynote with Jensen.” – Rob Strechay, research analyst with theCUBE, discussing a host of celebrities joining Nvidia’s CEO during the company’s annual GTC event in March.

“We’re not in for winter. The business fundamentals of AI are stronger than ever. AI is a general-purpose technology. It’s like electricity.” – Andrew Ng, the founder of Google Brain and one of the AI’s leading technologists, during a panel discussion at CES in January.

“We are in this massive hype cycle at the moment around AI: ‘AI is going to fix all of this stuff that’s broke.’ I think there’s a really big reality gap between the promise that’s been told and where we are as an industry and what needs to happen to actually realize the outcome.” — Andrew Coward, general manager for software networking at IBM Corp., during an interview at MWC Barcelona in February.

“You are very siloed… you are so screwed because silos don’t work well together. We will enable you to deploy as a full stack to virtualize your entire data center. It’s resilient, it’s secure and it costs much less than the public cloud.” – Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom Inc., in his keynote remarks at VMware Explore in August.

“Try doing AI from a mainframe. It’s nearly impossible.” — Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, in an exclusive interview with theCUBE during AWS re:Invent in December.

“The leapfrogging of performance is massive. You’re going to have a personal assistant in front of you. That personal assistant is going to help you search, it’s going to help you organize, it’s going to help you do live caption, it’s going to help you do recall and it’s going to help you create. It’s a new wave of innovation that’s going to hit the PC that we haven’t seen. — Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Dell Technologies Inc., at Dell Technologies World in May.

“I heard a great quote yesterday that marketers are worried that AI is going to take over their job. The job is not going to be taken by AI, but it might be taken by a marketer who understands AI.” — Regan Yan, CEO of Digital Alchemy Ltd., at SAS Innovate in April.

“My concern, if we’re talking about slightly apocalyptic scenarios, is if we get used to AI especially in creative intellectual tasks like creative writing or maybe artistic work, that we will lose our skills. To me this is scary. Do we want to live in a world where all the cool stuff is done by machines?” — Michael Bronstein, DeepMind professor of AI at the University of Oxford, during an interview at Qlik Connect in June.

“Part of our work as a community is to build out an AI governance machine. We need to build an industrial revolution that is sensitive to the needs of the planet.” — Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith, during a presentation at Web Summit Europe in November.

“It needs to be all-hands-on-deck, The stakes are high enough that I feel comfortable that people are going to rise to the challenge. We will not have a sufficient workforce; we will not have a strong enough economy if we do not have more people ready to participate in our AI economy.” – Miriam Vogel, president and CEO of EqualAI, discussing her organization’s work to craft AI guidance for the White House, during an interview at SAS Innovate in April.

“Someone in the keynote today said that Kubernetes is having its Linux moment with AI and I thought there could not be a bigger compliment out there. Cloud native and AI are the most critical technology trends today. Cloud native is the only ecosystem that can keep up with AI innovation.” — CNCF Executive Director Priyanka Sharma, during a press conference at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe in March.

“AI won’t be built by a single vendor, it isn’t going to run around a single monolithic model. Your choice of where to run AI will be everywhere, and it’s going to be based on open source.” — Matt Hicks, president and CEO of Red Hat Inc., in his keynote remarks at the Red Hat Summit in May.

“In AI, we are all sort of collectively trying to figure out what openness means. In large language models, this is where the definition of openness gets a little tricky.” — Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in remarks during the Open Source Summit in April.

“Are we handling AI functionally differently than any new technology? I don’t think we are. We probably have already had a really nasty AI intrusion that we don’t even know about.” — Steve Stone, head of Zero Labs at Rubrik Inc., in an interview with SiliconANGLE at the cybersecurity Black Hat conference in August.

“This is absolutely a growth industry. There’s always going to be a market for people who want or need to control information online.” — Adam Holland, project manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in an interview with SiliconANGLE for a story published in November about the expanding influence of reputation management firms.

“Trust has not evaporated, it has migrated.” — Yasmin Green, CEO of Google LLC’s Jigsaw, discussing reliance on online influencers for information during a presentation at EmTech MIT in October.

“The most important tech person in the world has now become the shadow vice president.” – “West Wing” actor Richard Schiff, analyzing the influence of Tesla, X and SpaceX leader Elon Musk, during an appearance at Web Summit Europe in mid-November.

“You can think of this as a technology ‘supercycle,’ these are converging technologies that are starting to help each one move faster. We are at the very beginning of a long-term change. Tomorrow is going to look quite different from today.” — Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, in a presentation at EmTech MIT in October.

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