The enterprise AI arms race shows no signs of slowing. Writer, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2020, on Tuesday announced a $200 million series C venture capital boost, giving the company unicorn status at a $1.9 billion valuation. Writer will use the new funding to accelerate development of its AI solutions and applications for use in healthcare, retail, and financial services. Last month, Writer launched its enterprise large language model (LLM) trained on synthetic data, which is becoming an increasingly popular training method as company’s look to minimize privacy concerns. “We’re not just creating LLMs that can execute tasks but developing advanced AI systems that deliver mission-critical enterprise work,” Writer CEO and Co-Founder May Habib said in a statement. “With this new funding, we’re laser-focused on delivering the next generation of autonomous AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and adaptable in highly complex, real-world enterprise scenarios.” According to Statista, the global AI market size in 2024 stood at $184 billion. In 2023, AI startups saw valuations 20% higher than non-AI companies raising seed funding. At the Series B level, AI startup valuations were nearly 60% higher. As companies race to add generative AI (GenAI) capabilities, AI vendors are releasing enterprise-grade solutions at a quick pace. OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Salesforce, Oracle, and many other vendors are looking to cash in on booming AI demand. Related:IT Pros Love, Fear, and Revere AI: The 2024 State of AI Report Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth led the funding round. Writer’s backers include Salesforce, Adobe, Citi, IBM, and Workday venture arms, along with Accenture, Vanguard and other major tech venture capital investors. The company boasts a client list that includes Ally Bank, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Uber, and more. Writer’s $1.9 billion valuation is quadruple the company’s September 2023 valuation of $500 million. Bloomberg Intelligence expects GenAI to reach a market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 with a compound annual growth rate of 43%. As of March 2024, the AI sector had 214 unicorns (companies with at least a $1 billion valuation) globally, according to Edge Delta. OpenAI is currently the most valuable of those companies with an $80 billion valuation. source

IT service management (ITSM) tools and practices transformed the tech side of the enterprise by automating service and support operations, along with adding employee self-service options. The combination was so effective that organizations are applying the principles to the entire organization in the form of enterprise service management (ESM), allowing departments such as human resources (HR), finance, and facilities to transform their own processes. The approach can, for example: Help HR departments to standardize and automate employee onboarding Allow finance teams to reduce manual work while increasing quality and accuracy Enable legal teams to track and accelerate document submissions and reviews ESM is now rapidly becoming more transformative with the incorporation of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and agentic AI. Thanks to the November 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many people are familiar with genAI’s ability to perform specific tasks on request. Users can prompt a genAI model, for example, to write an email, summarize a lengthy document, or create an image, and a genAI tool responds based on the user’s prompt. Agentic AI is more autonomous, capable of initiating and performing tasks on its own, such as analyzing data, making recommendations, and carrying out automated processes with minimal oversight. How AI enhances ESM Both genAI and agentic AI add powerful capabilities across IT and business processes throughout the enterprise, making it easier for employees to find and access the resources they need. Consider when an employee needs to initiate a change of address or request a leave of absence with HR. Traditionally, the individual would search for the right document from a knowledge base or HR portal to find the information they need. That might require opening, reading, and searching several different documents to find the right answers. An ESM solution with genAI enables a simple query – such as “What is the process for requesting a leave of absence?” – to launch a chatbot that will not only summarize the process, but also present the correct form to the employee and even pre-populate some of the entries. By simplifying the process and summarizing from up-to-date documents, genAI saves time and effort, delivering fast responses to employees. Agentic AI takes simplicity and automation a step further. An HR manager, for example, could instruct an agentic AI model within their ESM system to ensure the knowledge base for specific policy documents remains current, updating documents as new information and policies arise, and notifying approvers as needed. The technology can also act as a curator, flagging or even replacing old, duplicate, or expired articles to keep the knowledge base fresh. Another example: An employee notices a spill of an unknown fluid on the floor. The individual could send a picture to an AI agent, which analyzes the location, potential sources of the leak, and any identifying characteristics of the fluid. If the contents are potentially hazardous, the AI agent could then automatically alert relevant facilities teams, initiating the cleanup process and mitigating safety concerns. Agentic AI can also optimize automated processes by analyzing service and request fulfillment performance data to recommend areas of process improvement across departments, further optimizing service delivery across the organization. Elevate your ESM experience With the latest enhancements of genAI and agentic AI in the BMC Helix ESM solution, BMC delivers more robust ESM outcomes, elevating service quality and speed across departments. Enhanced self-service, conversational interfaces, and AI-powered automation are now core to the modern ESM experience, helping organizations drive efficiency, responsiveness, and better employee experiences across every department. Delve deeper into the ways that AI is upleveling ESM. Visit here for more information or contact BMC. source

News influencers – People who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube. Political orientation – A measure of a news influencer’s partisan or ideological views. A right-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Republican or conservative or support Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. A left-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Democrat, liberal or progressive or support Vice President Kamala Harris (or supported President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race) in the 2024 election. This information was found in the bio, profile picture, banner image, pinned posts or recent posts on an influencer’s social media account, any personal website or professional page, and prominent media coverage. Values and identities – Language or imagery in the bio, profile picture, banner image or pinned posts on an influencer’s social media account that expresses specific beliefs or identities. News organization affiliation – An influencer with this affiliation is one who either currently works for or previously worked for a news organization, as well as freelancers who have regularly contributed to news organizations. A news organization can be any news outlet that has a staff and multiple bylines. Researchers considered affiliated influencers to have this background regardless of their news organization’s political orientation, audience size or primary publishing method (digital, TV, print, etc.). Major social media sites – The five primary sites we studied, chosen based on audience size and the presence of discussion about news: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. About half of all YouTube news influencers explicitly express a clear political orientation. Among those who do, a higher share are right-leaning (28% of all YouTube news influencers) than left-leaning (21%). Just 4% have some other kind of political orientation, and about half (46%) do not express any lean. News influencers were categorized by whether they identify with a political party or ideology or expressed support for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in their social media profile, posts, personal website or media coverage. In addition to political ideology, researchers evaluated accounts for any expressed values or identities, finding that 8% of YouTube news influencers express a pro-LGBTQ+ position or identify as LGBTQ+ on their page. An identical share indicate a pro-Palestinian position, while 5% are pro-Israeli. These positions can be indicated in a variety of ways, whether through words, images or emojis (including flags). Some YouTube news influencers also prominently display their opposition to abortion (3%) or support for abortion rights (less than 1%). On YouTube, roughly two-thirds of news influencers (68%) are men, compared with 28% who are women. For details on how researchers categorized news influencers by gender, refer to the methodology. Almost nine-in-ten YouTube news influencers (88%) have not been affiliated with a news organization. About one-in-ten (12%) currently work for (or used to work for) digital, TV and other news organizations. For more details on the differences between influencers with a news industry background and those without one, read Chapter 4. What are YouTube news influencers posting about? In order to get a sense of what news influencers are posting about, researchers collected and analyzed all public posts by the 500 news influencers in our sample for three separate weeks: July 15-21, July 29-Aug. 4 and Aug. 19-25. There were many major events related to the election in or around these weeks, including the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, the Republican National Convention (RNC) July 15-18, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race July 21 and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) Aug. 19-22. Among all YouTube posts that addressed current events and civic issues during these weeks, 68% were about politics or the election – a higher share than other sites. This includes posts about the DNC (11%), the first Trump assassination attempt (8%) and the RNC (6%). The next-most common topics were social issues (17% of all posts), including racial issues (6%), and international issues (8%), mostly the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars. What other sites are YouTube news influencers on? Very few news influencers on YouTube are only on YouTube. The vast majority have a presence on at least four social media sites, including about half (54%) who are on four or more sites in addition to YouTube (five or more in total). The most common sites where YouTube news influencers can also be found are X, formerly known as Twitter (86%), and Instagram (74%). Smaller shares are also on Facebook (54%) and TikTok (44%). About half of all news influencers on YouTube (49%) also host a podcast, slightly higher than the share on any other major social media site we studied. Our previous study of podcasts found that about half of top-ranked podcasts also have a video component, often on YouTube. A smaller share of YouTube news influencers (28%) have a newsletter that they send out to subscribers or fans. Although a majority of news influencers across social media sites (59%) seek financial support from their audiences, this is especially common on YouTube, where 80% of news influencers do this in some way. This includes 68% who offer subscriptions, often providing content that goes beyond their YouTube videos (YouTube has built-in subscription tools for creators). One-in-ten YouTube news influencers have a public Discord server where they can further connect with audiences. source

Forrester’s US end-of-year holiday season forecast for 2024 is live! Forrester defines holiday retail sales as the purchase of durable and nondurable goods that consumers make during November and December. These sales don’t include automotive and gasoline sales or spending on services, such as food and drink services at restaurants. What can retailers and brands expect this year? A few highlights from our just-released forecast: US total holiday retail sales in 2024 will top $1 trillion — up 3.7% year over year from 2023. That includes holiday sales made online and offline (e.g., in stores). We forecast that US shoppers will spend about one-quarter of that total specifically online — 10.1% year-over-year growth from 2023. US shoppers will spend the balance of the holiday season forecast in-store/offline — smaller year-over-year growth than in 2023 and 2022 but growth nonetheless. As in previous years, we see that retail specials around events like Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days have pulled some holiday spend into October. Favorable macroeconomic factors are bolstering the outlook for 2024 holiday sales. Plus, deflation — whereby prices actually come down — is happening across numerous durable and nondurable goods categories. That said, a recent US Federal Reserve study shows that wealthier households are the primary drivers of US retail sales, supported by rising asset prices, particularly in housing and stocks. The benefits of wage growth are not evenly distributed across all segments of the workforce; blue-collar workers have seen only modest growth in real wages. To learn more, please see our forecast report. If you’re a Forrester client, please schedule a guidance session or inquiry with me to discuss the forecast in more detail. source

Raising antitrust concerns Then there’s the pure antitrust question — such a lock-in could bring scrutiny from regulators, who are already eyeing potential monopolies in the AI space. In fact, Amazon’s previous $4 billion investment did prompt an investigation by the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA), but that was dropped within one month. Similarly, Nvidia is under investigation by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). However, at least in the US, antitrust could be less of a concern in the very near future, with transition to the Trump regime in January. Ultimately, said Ramsinghaney, the positive or negative impact of such an expanded Amazon-Anthropic partnership will depend on how the companies choose to structure their arrangement and how much they prioritize (or don’t) open standards, cross-platform support, and customer choice. source

By Brian Steele ( November 14, 2024, 5:29 PM EST) — A bipartisan coalition of 47 attorneys general encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to implement new rules aimed at improving the effectiveness of the Robocall Mitigation Database, or RMD, writing in a comment letter that the database is “currently one of the most important sources of information available for anti-robocall enforcement actions.”… 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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Dell announced a suite of new products and services—many intended to address roadblocks to companies adopting generative AI and LLMs—at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, held from Nov. 17 to 22 in Atlanta. Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of Infrastructure and Telecom Product Marketing at Dell, said the most pressing issues preventing AI adoption are quality of data, cost, and energy, power demands, and sustainability concerns. “Enterprises are pursuing AI to remain competitive in today’s digital landscape, but they need to harness their proprietary data to differentiate,” Dave Vellante, chief analyst at theCUBE Research, said in a press release. “We’re seeing a resurgence in interest for offerings like Dell’s AI infrastructure, solutions, and services that can help customers prepare their data to extract insights, automate tasks, and transform processes.” Three new server products focus on AI workloads Dell announced three new server products: the PowerEdge XE7740 and PowerEdge XE9685L, and updates to the Integrated Rack 5000 (IR5000) series. The PowerEdge XE7740 with Xeon 6 processors is appropriate for inference and fine-tuning. Eight front PCIe slots allow for high-speed network connections for GPU-to-GPU performance. “This is probably the best platform for enterprise adoption to start,” Chhabra said. The Dell PowerEdge XE9685L holds up to 96 NVIDIA Tensor Core H200 or B200 GPUs per rack for high-density computing needs, such as AI training. “Not only are we building the platform, we expect that we can deliver all of this in a rack-scale solution out-of-the-factory integrated,” Chhabra noted. Both PowerEdge products, which will be released in the first quarter of 2025, are available through the Dell Integrated Rack Scalable Systems program. Relatedly, Dell also debuted a turnkey solution in the Dell Integrated Rack 5000 series, an expansion of the rack 7000 series, which can be either liquid-cooled or air-cooled and can hold 96 GPUs per rack. It will be compatible with the upcoming NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchip. The new server products join a lineup of scalable options. Image: Dell Must-read big data coverage Dell Data Lakehouse gains Apache Spark integration Also revealed at the conference, Dell Data Lakehouse will now support unified access control between the Trino query engine and the Apache Spark processing system. “Dell does the homework and the legwork of testing and validating the most common ecosystem options customers have for their AI workloads,” Chhabra said. “The continued reimagining and improvement of AI and HPC technologies is critical to accelerating discoveries across industries,” Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, said in a press release. “With Dell’s AI solutions, we are building complex HPC systems that allow innovation to thrive in research communities. Ultimately, these advances have the potential to reshape society and drive progress that benefits everyone.” Dell partners with NVIDIA on AI infrastructure initiatives In the realm of AI infrastructure, Chhabra said Dell is dedicated to optimizing its AI Factory by leveraging NVIDIA hardware. At the Supercomputing event, Dell revealed they’ll offer support for NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs by the end of the year. This includes the H200 SXM cloud GPUs. “We spend a lot of time working with NVIDIA on integrating their software upgrades, testing and validating their software upgrades on top of our infrastructure,” Chhabra said. Dell plans to support the NVIDIA H100 NVL GPU in upcoming PowerEdge servers and offers a new solution for general professional users and data scientists: Dell Agentic RAG with NVIDIA. Its RAG agents handle company-specific data access and regulatory challenges. These are available now, while the GPU update will be available before the end of the year. Dell Data Management and other services create roadmaps for Dell products Lastly, Dell announced a handful of services available as of Nov. 18: Dell Data Management Services for data governance, insights, automated workflows, and on-ramps to using AI for data catalogs. Dell Services for Sustainable Data Centers provides advisory and implementation services for organizations that want to create data-driven sustainability, power utilization, cooling, and water solutions. Dell Design Services for AI Networking offers advisory and implementation services to optimize data use, networking, and the overall design and architecture of clusters and data centers for AI use. Dell Implementation Services for ServiceNow Assist is an on-ramp to AI services on Service Now. It helps potential customers understand or target use cases and integrate the Service Now Platform into their AI services, use cases, and LLM deployments. “As we continue into this new era of technological innovation,” Vellante explained, “it will be critical for enterprises to continuously learn and invest in innovation to realize the benefits AI promises.” source

News influencers – People who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube. Political orientation – A measure of a news influencer’s partisan or ideological views. A right-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Republican or conservative or support Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. A left-leaning news influencer is one who publicly expresses that they identify as a Democrat, liberal or progressive or support Vice President Kamala Harris (or supported President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race) in the 2024 election. This information was found in the bio, profile picture, banner image, pinned posts or recent posts on an influencer’s social media account, any personal website or professional page, and prominent media coverage. Values and identities – Language or imagery in the bio, profile picture, banner image or pinned posts on an influencer’s social media account that expresses specific beliefs or identities. News organization affiliation – An influencer with this affiliation is one who either currently works for or previously worked for a news organization, as well as freelancers who have regularly contributed to news organizations. A news organization can be any news outlet that has a staff and multiple bylines. Researchers considered affiliated influencers to have this background regardless of their news organization’s political orientation, audience size or primary publishing method (digital, TV, print, etc.). Major social media sites – The five primary sites we studied, chosen based on audience size and the presence of discussion about news: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube. About an even balance of TikTok news influencers explicitly identify with the political left and right: 25% of TikTok news influencers publicly express a right-leaning political orientation, while 28% lean left. Influencers were categorized by whether they identify with a political party or ideology or expressed support for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in their social media profile, posts, personal website or media coverage. About this chapter This chapter looks at news influencers on TikTok. Virtually all of them also have accounts on other sites. For analysis of news influencers in general across social media sites, read the report overview. In this report, news influencers are people with large followings on social media sites who regularly post about current events or civic issues. Refer to the methodology for details. Related: TikTok users’ experiences with news TikTok also has a higher share of news influencers (relative to other sites studied) who identify as LGBTQ+ or support LGBTQ+ rights (13%). Meanwhile, more TikTok news influencers express a pro-Palestinian view (9%) than a pro-Israeli viewpoint (2%). These values and identities can be indicated in a variety of ways, whether through words, images or emojis (including flags). TikTok news influencers are more evenly split between men (50%) and women (45%) than news influencers on other sites, who tend to be mostly men. For details on how we coded news influencers by gender, refer to the methodology. The vast majority of news influencers on TikTok (84%) do not have a background with a news organization. But 16% do have links to the news industry, including people who formerly worked for a news organization (e.g., a newspaper, TV station or news website) but are now independent. For more details on the differences between influencers with and without a news industry background, read Chapter 4. What are TikTok news influencers posting about? To get a sense of what news influencers are posting about, researchers collected and analyzed all public posts by the 500 news influencers in our sample for three separate weeks: July 15-21, July 29-Aug. 4 and Aug. 19-25. There were many major events related to the election in or around these weeks, including the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, the Republican National Convention (RNC) July 15-18, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race July 21 and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) Aug. 19-22. Among posts by TikTok news influencers that addressed current events and civic issues, 52% were focused on U.S. government, politics or elections. Other common topics were social issues (including racial issues), international issues, crime, and technology (such as cryptocurrencies). What other sites are TikTok news influencers on? It is very common for news influencers on TikTok to also have accounts on several other social media sites. In fact, more than half (57%) have accounts on four or more other sites in addition to TikTok, while only 11% are on TikTok alone. TikTok news influencers are slightly more likely to have an account on Instagram (82%) than any other site. But a majority also have accounts on YouTube (71%) and X, formerly known as Twitter (64%). And half of influencers on TikTok also have a Facebook account. Some TikTok news influencers also engage with their audiences in other ways. Nearly four-in-ten (37%) host a podcast, and 22% produce an email newsletter. Six-in-ten news influencers on TikTok offer paid subscriptions, often to additional content beyond just videos on TikTok, while four-in-ten solicit donations and a similar share (38%) sell branded merchandise. All told, about three-quarters (74%) seek financial support in at least one of these ways. (TikTok has tools to help all creators – not just news influencers – monetize content.) More than one-in-ten TikTok news influencers (14%) also have a public Discord server where they can further connect with fans and followers. source

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