AI at work: Still a work in progress

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Google and AWS serve up new visions for deploying AI agents at work, the impact of the Oracle E-Business Suite hack is starting to look much bigger than initially acknowledged, and the latest enterprise moves.

(Please forward this email to a friend or colleague! And if it was forwarded to you, sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

But can they fetch coffee

At some point, given how many companies are desperately trying, someone is going to design a new user experience that changes the way people source and manage the information they need to do their jobs. Google and AWS launched two new services Thursday that they promise will unlock a golden age of business productivity through agentic AI, a pitch you might have heard a time or two over the last year.

Gemini Enterprise is "an intuitive chat interface that acts as a single front door for AI in the workplace," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a blog post Thursday. It brings several of Google's enterprise AI products together — namely its Gemini AI models and the Agentspace agent-building tool — behind a new user interface that looks a lot like the classic Google search box.

• A "no-code workbench" allows teams across a company to build their own agents with access to corporate data wherever it is stored through partnerships with several prominent SaaS vendors such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.
• It also comes with several Google-designed agents, allowing Google Meet users to have access to "real-time speech translation" across different languages.
• However, it's not cheap: the enterprise edition costs $30 per user per month on top of your existing Google Workspace subscription, although a cheaper $21 per user per month option is available for smaller teams.

AWS launched a similar but slightly different service Thursday, introducing the Amazon Quick Suite. Designed as a replacement to its Q Business service, which you probably never used unless you worked for Amazon, the Quick Suite is based around a chatbot called Quick.

• Quick users can "ask questions and get detailed answers, conduct deep dive research, analyze and visualize data, and create automations for workflows to save time and let you focus on the big picture," AWS's Swami Sivasubramanian said in a blog post.
• The suite also connects to a wide variety of external sources of enterprise data, from Snowflake and Databricks to Google Drive and Microsoft Sharepoint, and supports MCP to allow customers to build their own connections.
• AWS has a far greater challenge than cloud rivals like Microsoft and Google when it comes to getting regular workers to use its tools, and AWS chief marketing officer Julia White told Bloomberg that the $20 per user per month service will initially target sales and marketing professionals. 

Both services appear to have been designed to stunt the growth of OpenAI in the enterprise, focusing on how they provide "a single front door" (Google) and "critical security and privacy features" (AWS) for companies that want to adopt generative AI tools. OpenAI made it very clear earlier this week that it wants a bigger piece of the lucrative enterprise software market, which might be the only way it can generate enough revenue to pay for the enormous computing infrastructure network it supposedly plans on building.

• Both Google and AWS have far more experience selling software to enterprise customers, but both companies were clearly caught off-guard by the launch of ChatGPT three years ago and are still trying to duplicate that buzz.
• And while it's true that AI agents work much better when they have full access to corporate data, which makes OpenAI a tougher sell inside a lot of enterprises, people still have to want to use those agents to justify their cost.
• It's going to take several years for this all to play out, but it's starting to feel like the real  future of knowledge work will be built by a generation already steeped in generative AI tools, rather than the enterprise software giants of the current day.

Any business that survived the digital revolution is very familiar with how quickly networking requirements can shift. But even with the crash course most got as the internet, mobile computing, and the cloud emerged, few are prepared for the speed with which emerging technologies today are challenging existing environments.

Check out our latest post, "Why future-proofing the workplace for AI starts at the network," sponsored by Cisco.

Of paramount importance

Oracle's E-Business Suite customers were exposed to potential hacks long after the company patched a known vulnerability in July, according to a blog post released Thursday by the Google Threat Intelligence Group. After several Oracle customers reported receiving extortion attempts from the Clop ransomware gang last week related to what the company initially said was an already-patched vulnerability, Oracle suggested that the matter was in the past.

However, the Google investigation sheds a little more light on the timeline of events, showing that Oracle EBS customers were still under attack in August and September through a different vulnerability. Oracle released a patch on Saturday that addressed the new flaws and updated it on Tuesday, but GTIG said "in some cases, the threat actor successfully exfiltrated a significant amount of data from impacted organizations" weeks before that patch was released.

"Days earlier, Oracle’s chief security officer, Rob Duhart, claimed in the same post — since scrubbed — that the extortion campaign was linked to previously identified vulnerabilities that Oracle patched in July, suggesting the hacks were over," TechCrunch reported Thursday. That makes two incidents in the past calendar year where Oracle has played fast and loose with the truth surrounding the security of its services, which is two too many.

Enterprise moves

Rajeev Singh is the new CEO of Smartsheet, joining the company after serving as CEO of Accolade.

Ragy Eleish is the new CTO of Incorta, joining the data integration company after founding Regwez.

Maksim Ovsyannikov is the new chief product officer at SugarCRM, following product leadership roles at Crossbeam and Gainsight.

Nabitha Rao is the new chief digital and information officer at SymphonyAI, following tech leadership roles at GitLab and RingCentral.

Raghu Raghuram is a new managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on AI infrastructure after leading VMware during its sale to Broadcom.

Matt Field is the new chief real estate officer at Crusoe, joining the AI neocloud after 30 years at San Francisco commercial real-estate company TMG Partners.

The Runtime roundup

Microsoft was still trying to resolve problems with its Azure Front Door content-delivery network as of publishing time, which earlier in the day locked an unknown number of customers out of their Microsoft 365 accounts.

Meanwhile, GitHub will migrate its infrastructure to Azure after Microsoft folded the company into its CoreAI group, The New Stack reported.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!