Better together? Why AWS is unifying data analytics and AI services in SageMaker

The integration of data and AI offerings at AWS and Azure, though, raises important questions about how they will adapt their partnerships with players like Snowflake and Databricks, Gupta said: “These companies, once central to data unification efforts, now face growing competition from the integrated offerings of the two cloud giants.” While many technology vendors appear to be converging on the same unification strategy, Constellation’s Henschen said that AWS is a step ahead of Google, Microsoft, Databricks, and others. Microsoft’s Fabric and Google’s BigQuery have similar AI model development capabilities, he said, but they don’t yet have SageMaker’s inbuilt generative AI development capabilities. On the other hand, Moor Insights and Strategy’s Jason Andersen sees AWS’s intentions with SageMaker differently. While at a high level the new version of SageMaker may resemble Fabric, AWS intends to offer a consistent experience for the entire data life cycle from data to model development, he said, comparable to a developer platform that offers tools to manage the entire software development lifecycle. source

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Think Like A Lawyer: Note 3 Simple Types Of Legal Complexity

By Luke Andrews ( December 6, 2024, 9:23 AM EST) — Misconceptions about what it means to “think like a lawyer” start in law school and hinder many attorneys throughout their practice. In this monthly column, I discuss an alternative way of organizing and sequencing legal arguments. This installment looks at three basic types of complex cases, and discusses why they’re really not so complex after all…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

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7 Real Estate Marketing Calendar Templates [Free & Paid]

Whether you’re showcasing a new listing, promoting your services, or sharing details of an open house, real estate marketing calendar templates can make your life much easier. These tools help you stay organized while planning all of your upcoming marketing activities in one place. From video walkthroughs on social media to newsletters, blogs, and beyond, you can use any of these templates to organize and plan your real estate marketing calendar. monday.com: A customizable real estate marketing calendar template built for collaboration monday.com is a project management platform that’s highly collaborative and built to scale. It’s a great option for real estate agencies of all sizes — your entire team can use it to plan, track, and assign marketing activities. While monday.com offers a free plan for up to two users, it doesn’t include a calendar view so you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan if that’s something you need. More on monday.com: monday.com Review | monday.com vs Jira | monday.com vs. Notion. monday.com’s real estate marketing calendar helps agents and their team collaborate on marketing activities. Image: monday.com If you’re anything like me, you’ll appreciate that monday.com can be so much more than just a generic calendar template to plan your marketing activities. You can use it to run just about every aspect of your entire business if you’d like, from managing projects and listings to clients, budgets, digital assets, and more. Whether you have a team of realtors working collaboratively or you have a dedicated department for marketing, you can easily assign tasks to everyone involved and track progress as you go. It also works well if you manage different types of content across different platforms. You can use built in color coding or a custom field to designate whatever you need. Larger agencies may set up one calendar for shared responsibilities while giving each agent their own calendar to manage individual marketing needs. Smaller teams, on the other hand, can probably get away with one calendar instead. The biggest drawback of this template is that you likely won’t be able to use it to its full potential for free. If you prefer saving money, there are plenty of free platforms that give you a calendar view at no cost. ClickUp: A free planning and budgeting real estate marketing template ClickUp offers an excellent free plan for solo users and small teams. Unlike monday.com, ClickUp includes a calendar view in its free plan and unlimited free users so you can onboard your whole team for free. The free plan also includes Kanban view, team chat, collaborative docs, and more. And like most project management solutions, you can use it for a lot more than just marketing if you want to. It’s just as great for managing clients, employees, HR activities, listings, and anything else you might need. More on ClickUp: ClickUp Review | ClickUp vs Asana | ClickUp vs. Notion. Easily plan and manage content alongside your marketing budget with ClickUp. Image: Clickup.com One of the best parts of this template is the ability to plan and track your marketing budget. You can set a budget for each campaign or piece of content if you want to get really granular. If you’d rather focus on selling properties, you’re likely working with (or will soon work with) photographers, videographers, and maybe even writers to produce your content. This template makes it easy to track those expenses and ensure you stay under budget along the way. This is particularly useful if you base marketing spend on commissions or want to dedicate extra funds to specific listings. There’s also a space to manage tasks without cluttering up your calendar. You’ll be able to switch between various views, including list, Kanban board, table, and more. You can also invite your clients to collaborate with you at no extra cost if you’d like them to weigh in on your marketing plans. They’ll need to create a ClickUp account to do this, but it’s a nice option to have for your clients who expect you to go the extra mile. Wrike: A template for real estate marketing teams Wrike is a traditional project management solution that comes with a lot of powerful features for workflow management and automation. Although it can work well for agents, it’s a better fit for full marketing teams who have (or want) well-defined processes. There’s a free plan with unlimited users, up to 2 GB of storage, and basic task management capabilities. It’s a good place to start, but it won’t work for the long long term. Wrike’s paid plans start at $10 per month and include calendar view, custom fields, Gantt charts, dashboards, generative AI, and more. More on Wrike: Wrike Review | Wrike vs Asana | Wrike vs Smartsheet. Marketing teams will appreciate Wrike’s built in request forms, approval flows, and multiple work views. Image: Wrike.com This Wrike template is a general marketing calendar designed for marketing teams managing numerous campaigns at a time. It’s a great option if you have a dedicated marketing team working with multiple agents or clients that need an easy way to stay organized. Although it’s not specifically for real estate, it’s easy to customize to match your needs. Once it’s set up, it’ll help your team adhere to your processes and stay on track. One of the most helpful features is a pre built marketing request form. Say an agent secures a new listing and wants to start marketing it right away. They can submit a request that includes photos, details, post ideas, the target market, and more. From there, your marketing team can come up with ideas, create all the content required, publish it, and let the requestor know it’s ready. Wrike’s overall architecture lets you create folders and individual projects, which can work well for managing marketing calendars for different agents or clients. On top of that, marketers can see all of their work across projects in one place, so nothing falls through the cracks. More expensive

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Quick Study: The Future of Work Is Here

There might be someone, somewhere — possibly on some isolated South Pacific Island — who hasn’t wondered about the impact of artificial intelligence and other technologies on their job. For the rest of us, AI’s invasion has the workforce pondering what it means to us, how it changes the nature of our work, the value of our paychecks, and even if we have a job going forward.  All legitimate questions.  Browsing through the past year or so of InformationWeek articles, we found a boatload of content focused on the role of AI and other tech today and in the future. In updating this Future of Work Quick Study, posted in mid-2023, we hope to provide you with insight into what IT leaders and their teams can expect from those technologies, and how they can build a modern workforce that enables their organizations and careers to flourish.  One thing we can be sure of is that, for all the change we’ve seen in the past couple of years, still more change is on the horizon.  The Hybrid: Work From Home and From Work  It’s Different IT: Tech Support for Remote Users  How does the IT team’s approach change when it must provide technical support for remote workforces?  Onboarding Employees in the Age of Remote  Remote changed IT hiring fast, but onboarding employees didn’t quite keep pace. Often, new employees like software engineers benefit from having someone sitting across from them. Here’s insight from a company that’s been there and done with advice on how to get it right.  Are Return to Work Mandates Wise?  Some businesses are mandating that some or all employees return to the office. While the motives are understandable, there’s more to the story.  Negotiating Remote Work Agreements as Listings Thin  As organizations angle to get workers back to a more regular in-office work schedule, IT professionals are still in a strong position to bargain for remote and hybrid agreements, given the robust IT jobs market.  6 Lessons Learned from the Big Return to Office Debate of 2023  Hint: Trust your people for hybrid work to fuel the business.  6 Challenges and Opportunities for Hybrid and Remote IT Teams  Remote and hybrid work is here to stay. What does that mean for IT teams when employees want it, but managers may not like it?  ‘Manage By Walking Around’ in the Remote World  The concept ‘manage by walking around’ encourages CIOs and other execs to get away from their desks to really see how projects are progressing. Does it work in a remote workplace? Here’s some advice.  AI: A New Ballgame for the Workplace  Building an Augmented-Connected Workforce  AI and other advanced technologies are unleashing the augmented-connected workforce, enabling human-machine partnerships for new levels of business productivity.  Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on Leadership, ‘Tokenization,’ and GenAI Workforce Impact  The GPU chipmaking giant’s CEO says it’s important for CIOs to get started with AI and called for a more positive outlook on the emerging tech’s impact on the workforce.  CIOs Can Build a Resilient IT Workforce with AI and Unconventional Talent  As the IT talent crunch continues, chief information officers can embrace new strategies to combine traditional IT staff with nontraditional workers and AI to augment the workforce.  AI: Friend or Foe?  Adoption of AI continues, further fueled by generative AI. Like with all things tech, the hype needs to be tempered with a realistic expectation of results.  Navigating the Impact of AI on Teams  Leaders should prioritize artificial intelligence literacy, empathy, and balance AI benefits with human insights to navigate the transformative impact of AI on teams effectively.  How CEOs and IT Leaders Can Take the Wheel on Responsible AI Adoption  Leaders expect AI to reshape business, but readiness varies. Here’s why it’s crucial for CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs to develop responsible AI safety and innovation strategies now.  What Is the Future of AI-Driven Employee Monitoring?  Workplace monitoring isn’t new, but AI is giving employers new powers to sift through employee data and analyze their work performance.  How Companies Can Retain Employee Trust During the AI Revolution  Recent surveys indicate a trust gap among most employees, driven largely by job insecurity. Here are some ideas for enterprise leaders on how to grow  Utilizing Automation to Alleviate Alert Fatigue, Workforce Shortages, and More  This session explores strategies to address the growing volume of vulnerabilities and associated challenges of alert fatigue and resource shortages through safe automation.  The IT Jobs AI Could Replace and the Ones It Could Create  Transformative power of AI has the potential to eliminate and create jobs in the IT field.  Hire or Upskill? The Burning Question in an Age of Runaway AI  Generative AI speaks like a human but to make it work employees have to think like a machine. Where do you go to find that kind of talent?  The People (and Machines) You Work With  Quick Study: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion  Are we making progress in this sensitive, timely topic? Here’s a snapshot of our own articles on why DEI matters, how companies are addressing it, educational initiatives, cutting through bias, and more.  AI Robots Are Here. Are We Ready?  Robots are getting smarter and more intuitive thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. Can people survive the competition?  Eliminating Remote Work Will Ruin Tech’s Drive for Diversity  With some tech companies saying diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is unimportant, remote work should continue to be an option available at tech companies to increase DEI and help solve staffing challenges.  A New Generation and the Future of Sustainable Computing  The Gen Z generation has grown up with both powerful technology and a keen awareness of environmental impact. How will their perspectives as the new data scientists and stakeholders shape the future of sustainable computing?  The Importance of Mentors in Tech and Finance  Here’s why mentorship is instrumental in career growth, providing guidance and support for personal and professional development.  Integration, Insight, and AI Will Define DEI’s Next Era  Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are more important

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B2B Marketing Measurement Isn’t Trusted; And It’s About To Get Worse

Let’s brace ourselves for a hard truth. Trust in marketing measurement is already poor, and left unchecked, it’s poised to get 20% worse. The pain that your organization feels surrounding B2B marketing measurement problems is real. Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, revealed that 64% of B2B marketing leaders feel that their organization doesn’t trust measurement for decision-making. This hurts because marketing is a discipline with credibility that depends on data, facts, and insights, yet many marketing leaders don’t have faith in their company’s measurement when it matters the most. Not having trusted measurement hinders marketing’s ability to get its job done. Optimization of marketing efforts requires data to inform adjustments. That can’t happen when the metrics used to describe performance aren’t trusted. And without measurement to clearly depict marketing’s contribution, securing the budget and resources necessary to drive business impact becomes a losing battle. None of this is new, nor are the well-known contributors to the current state of marketing measurement (they include data quality, technology gaps, and the skills of measurement producers and consumers). All are aspects that B2B organizations continue to work to improve, but unfortunately, many B2B marketers will lose ground in these battles over the coming year. Why Is Measurement About To Get Tougher? We’re predicting that marketing measurement is about to get more difficult because of these compounding market forces: Buying complexity obscures so much. B2B sellers tell us that deal cycles have grown longer. Buyers tell us of the large quantities of individuals now involved in purchasing decisions. Persistent time-lag issues in detecting business impact grow more difficult with lengthened selling cycles. More people interacting with sales and marketing more times places more pressure on measurement systems already struggling to capture and make sense of their behaviors. Until vendor organizations recalibrate their business systems and processes, they will detect a limited portion of total buying interactions and will have to wait longer to understand results. Technology sprawl yields fractured data. The volume of technologies that make up the go-to-market technology stack results in disconnected data sources, and in turn, disconnected data is now a leading analytics challenge. Stitching together a cohesive picture of buyer behavior across these technologies is stretching the resources and skills of analytics teams — and this shows little signs of being alleviated. AI-inflated hope drives an expectation gap. AI has the potential to power meaningful improvements throughout B2B. This promise carries into widespread expectations that better measurement is possible by using AI to make sense of large volumes of data at speeds that humans will never replicate. But the distance between that vision and the current state of B2B marketing measurement should be counted in years, not months. B2B planning, processes and data aren’t yet in shape to meet AI’s potential. Stakeholders of all types will struggle for the foreseeable future to make sense of and develop faith in AI-driven views of performance. Expect a prolonged period of experimentation, missteps, and resets before B2B marketing analytics teams come anywhere close to cracking this code. Measurement can’t keep up with a renewed emphasis on reputation investment. B2B marketing investments have traditionally skewed toward capturing and advancing demand and so, too, has the focus of marketing measurement. But there’s growing recognition that demand efforts are not enough, and selling organizations must do more to influence buyers before they enter active buying cycles. Reputation spend now represents nearly one-quarter of marketing program investments, but we’re not seeing similar prioritization among what marketing leaders measure. Measurement analytics teams currently fall short in the skills and capabilities to measure this area that they’ve traditionally deprioritized. What’s To Be Done? Each of these market forces are larger than measurement, and there’s little that your analytics team can do to hold any of them at bay. What will separate the winning organizations from the rest is how they respond. In the face of these forces, here are a few actions that you can take to enhance your organization’s trust in marketing measurement: Tune your processes to buying complexity. Do the work to make it easier to link buyers to opportunity records, and work to capture not only self-guided interactions but personal ones, as well. Economize the B2B tech stack. Squeeze out duplicative capabilities found in best-in-breed solutions in favor of the broader solutions of platform providers. A more consolidated set of technologies will carry less overhead when it comes to data preparation and consolidation. Set clear reputation objectives. It’ll take time and resources to create comprehensive approaches to measuring reputation. In the meantime, start small by working with stakeholders to be sharp about setting reputation objectives and select a handful of available indicators that can show progress. Pair AI efforts with insight activation. Marketers are right to be excited by the potential of AI. At the same time, there’s a clear need to enable them to work more productively with the analytics already available. Marketing analytics teams need to redirect more of their time toward enabling their stakeholders to drive better results using existing resources. Doing so will better prepare them for the potential that AI is bound to unlock. Read our full Predictions 2025: B2B Marketing, Sales, And Product report to get more detail about how to get ahead in 2025. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 B2B strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary B2B Predictions guide, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Find additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. Reserve your seat for the upcoming B2B Predictions webinars to hear more insights from Forrester analysts: source

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Cloud modernization meets GenAI: new solutions expediate your efforts

As organizations globally discover new opportunities created by AI, many are investing significantly in GenAI, including as part of their cloud modernization efforts. They are using the considerable power of this fast-evolving technology to tackle the common challenges of cloud modernization, particularly in projects that involve the migration and modernization of legacy applications — a key enabler of digital and business transformation. Many legacy applications were not designed for flexibility and scalability. Making changes to their code can be difficult, and they often can’t be integrated with other processes or applications. The fact that these applications were not born in the cloud makes efforts to update them laborious at best and sometimes impossible. A primary benefit of cloud replatforming is that it gives organizations the flexibility to update, maintain or customize applications with extended functionality aimed at customers and employees. In this context, GenAI can be used to speed up release times. In fact, many organizations save up to 30% of the time from strategy to deployment by taking a modern approach to application modernization. A faster time to market and a better customer experience GenAI “copilots” are well-established in the world of software engineering and will continue to proliferate and evolve. More organizations and vendors are rolling out these coding agents to allow developers to fully automate or offload certain tasks. Increasingly, organizations are also using GenAI in industry cloud deployments and component-based development, as it speeds up modernization and promotes code reusability — writing code in such a way that it may be reused in multiple development contexts with little or no modification required. While this allows developers to build and deploy applications with ease, the value to the business is an improved speed to market and better customer experiences. Services are delivered faster and with stronger security and a higher degree of engagement, and it frees up skilled resources to focus on more strategic endeavors. AI and GenAI optimize cloud architectures and cloud-native applications GenAI is also proving adept at analyzing cloud architectures, suggesting optimal cloud configurations and identifying the most appropriate modernization approaches. More efficient workloads and processes allow organizations to reapply cost savings in other areas of the business. Furthermore, cloud-native applications can be used to apply full-time AI-driven threat hunting, digital forensics and incident responses, as well as faster security orchestration and responses. The result is a more cybersecure enterprise. Get ahead of the megatrend Nearly two-thirds of organizations already see GenAI as a game-changing technology and a megatrend on a par with cloud computing, according to NTT DATA’s Global GenAI Report. The early winners will be those who integrate it into both their culture and their roadmaps for cloud technology and application modernization. Get a copy of Winning big with AI-powered cloud modernization, a white paper published by CIO, NTT DATA and Microsoft. source

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Dell: Chief AI Officers Are Emerging as Lynchpin in AI Success

Senior executives from Dell are urging enterprise leaders across the Asia-Pacific region to create chief AI officer roles and to adopt a “top-down” approach to AI implementation. While 2024 has primarily seen early adopters experimenting with AI in production, Dell anticipates a pivotal shift in 2025, with more enterprises transitioning from proof-of-concept initiatives to deploying AI as core projects that deliver measurable returns on investment. John Roese, Dell’s global chief technology officer and chief AI officer, emphasised in a media briefing that the region’s primary challenge is not the technical feasibility of AI but rather creating the right organisational strategy and framework to ensure successful adoption. SEE: Dell’s 5 Tips for Enterprises Wanting to Accelerate AI Innovation “If you’re not the chief AI officer and you’re not empowered and supported by your board and your leadership, your ability to prioritise the right AI work in a company is limited,” he said. “You may not get any budget, you may not have control, and there may be competing AI efforts that are not the right ones.” The rise of chief AI officer roles in Asia-Pacific Peter Marrs, Dell’s president for the Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China region, explained at the briefing how he regularly meets with CTOs and CEOs across the region. As recently as November 2024, Marrs observed signs of AI project overload, with one customer managing over 300 AI projects simultaneously. “I am seeing in some of the biggest customers in the world, where they don’t have that strategy locked down, they’re still kind of swinging all over the place,” Marrs said. SEE: A Sovereign Cloud Boom is Happening In APAC Right Now To overcome these challenges, Marrs said more companies in APAC are now appointing chief AI officers to steer AI strategies. This is expected to bring more coherence and focus on enterprise AI strategies. “We are seeing a lot of our customers right now, especially the more mature enterprise customers, making investments in chief AI officers,” he noted. While they are also appointing AI committees with representation from business units, such as marketing, software development, and manufacturing, these business units are ultimately led by a chief AI officer. “Sometimes the CIO is playing a dual role, but more and more we are seeing companies investing in CIOs or chief AI officers to help them on their strategy and path forward around their AI enablement.” More must-read AI coverage The benefits of the ‘top-down’ approach to implementing AI Roese said the biggest issue for companies rolling out AI is no longer technology or methodology, which Dell believes it has solved for its customers with its defined “AI factory” model and approach. Instead, Roese said: “The thing that is still an issue which we are seeing, which has nothing to do with technology, is organisational complexity. How to do [AI] is becoming clearer, but how to organise a company to do it successfully is the really big active conversation right now,” he explained. Roese explained that even the most advanced companies are still struggling “to build the right organisational model to make sure they have an empowered leader” for AI “who can actually make strategic decisions.” This AI leadership role would involve confronting the reality that “some people won’t like those decisions” made about AI strategy and having the authority to enforce the chosen direction among business leaders. Roese said Dell was “very thoughtful” about internally structuring its AI efforts. The business has implemented measures to ensure all AI projects are “top-down and strategic.” Leveraging this top-down approach, all AI projects and use cases now require approval from Roese, CIO Doug Schmidt, and COO Jeff Clarke. SEE: Rethinking AI: How Organisations Can Become More Sensitive & Resilient “We knew that it would be impossible to get a consensus amongst all the business leaders about what the single most important AI project was to go implement, because all of them are important to our business leaders,” Roese explained. “But our ability to implement them is limited to only a handful at a time.” Roese strongly favors the top-down approach over the “bottom-up” option. While the bottom-up approach, where a business unit creates and implements an AI project, can foster innovation and experimentation, it may lead to misaligned priorities and inefficiencies without clear oversight and direction. Roese warned that this approach “cannot happen in the organisation.” SEE: AI Market Trends: Key Insights & How Enterprises Should Adapt Return on investment to spike in 2025 According to Dell, the first wave of AI return on investment will start next year. Roese said this will come in the form of savings, revenue, margin improvement, or significant changes in outcomes and result from having figured out through experimentation over the last two years how to use AI effectively. “We have seen that most of the AI tools needed to do enterprise AI have become standardised and turnkey,” he explained. “You do not need to build your own coding assistant. You can simply buy one and implement one on premise. There is now a clear methodology for implementing AI. “And what we have learned is, if you pick the right projects and approach them the right way, there is significant business impact in terms of hard ROI dollars. And that is important because enterprises do not like going first into an area where there is no proof they will be successful.” source

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