NVIDIA’s explosive growth fades, IBM & AWS accelerate responsible AI partnership

Meta pushes to embed AI tech in UK public sector as Accenture, Esker and Pegasystems release new generative AI features

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Michael Hill
11/27/2024

PEX Network’s weekly bulletin rounds up the latest industry vendor news including product releases/updates, mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes.

This week includes:

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NVIDIA’s explosive growth fades despite “full steam” of AI

NVIDIA’s rapid growth appears to be slowing despite the graphics processing unit (GPUs) giant’s latest quarterly sales almost doubling from the previous year. Last week, the company projected sales for the current quarter at about US$37.5 billion. However, it was the second consecutive period NVIDIA’s outlook didn’t exceed analysts’ estimates by a billion or more, Bloomberg reported.

“Despite NVIDIA’s CEO proclaiming that these numbers show the age of AI is in ‘full steam,’ the company’s stock price fell in after-market trading,” wrote Saira Malik, chief investment officer at Nuveen. “Why? Because in a world perennially starved for more, NVIDIA’s fourth-quarter revenue guidance apparently left investors concerned about capacity constraints and the potential impact that future tariffs proposed by the incoming US administration may have on NVIDIA’s growth,” she added.

AI is transforming every industry, company and country, stated Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Enterprises are adopting agentic AI to revolutionize workflows. Industrial robotics investments are surging with breakthroughs in physical AI, and countries have awakened to the importance of developing their national AI and infrastructure.”

Watch Lee Bogner, global AI and generative AI chief enterprise architect at Mars Inc., reflect on the role of data in AI

IBM and AWS to unveil latest responsible AI milestones

Technology and process mining provider IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will unveil new milestones in their collaboration to help businesses adopt responsible AI. The pair are working together to help ensure that organizations can harness the power of generative AI with an emphasis on transparency, security and trust. Next week at AWS re:Invent, they will showcase some of the ways they are advancing enterprise-grade AI tailored to specific business needs.

Highlights include:

IBM Granite models available on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart.
New integrations between IBM watsonx.governance and Amazon SageMaker.
New security, data and automation capabilities such as full stack observability for Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker with IBM Instana.

“IBM is one of our largest partners for both technology and consulting, and together we are at the forefront of enabling the democratization of AI,” said Chris Grusz, managing director, technology partnerships at AWS. “IBM has gone far beyond making their technology available on our platforms, they are prioritizing integration with AWS at each layer of the AI stack, making it easier for our mutual customers to choose the technology that best fits their needs and benefit from responsible AI in new ways.”

Watch thought leader and researcher, Michael Arena, discuss the power of social capital in the age of AI

Meta pushes AI bid for UK healthcare sector

Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is pushing to embed its AI technology in the UK’s public sector – particularly the National Health Service (NHS). Meta recently concluded its Llama Impact Hackathon in London, marking a significant milestone in AI innovation aimed at transforming public services. The event brought together over 200 developers across 56 teams, all leveraging Meta’s open source Llama 3.2 model to address critical challenges in healthcare, clean energy and social mobility.

Meta’s hackathon was addressed by Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and now Meta’s president of global affairs based in California. The winning team, Guardian, developed a concept of an AI-powered triage assistant which could reduce waiting times and better allocate resources in A&E departments. It won a share of $50,000 in Meta funding.

Datamatics appoints Ankush Akar as new SVP and CFO

Digital operations and intelligent document processing (IDP) vendor Datamatics appointed Ankush Akar as SVP and chief financial officer (CFO). Akar has more than 19 years of experience as a finance leader with a proven track record of driving profitable growth, cost optimization and large-scale transformations. In his new role, he will be responsible for strengthening and streamlining Datamatics’ finance operations while improving financial reporting and performance visibility, according to a press release.

“Ankush’s vast expertise and leadership will be instrumental in driving strategic financial initiatives, enhancing operational efficiencies and supporting Datamatics’ growth journey as we continue to deliver innovative solutions to our clients,” commented Rahul Kanodia, vice chairman and CEO of Datamatics.

Celonis to transform process optimization in marketing and media

Process mining and process intelligence leader Celonis announced a new partnership with advertising resource management (ARM) software provider MINT to revolutionize process optimization in marketing and media. The collaboration will enable MINT to embed process intelligence into the software, containing valuable data and knowledge about how marketing and media processes run and how they can be optimized, to deliver value across all industries, according to a press release.

Organizations will be able to identify operational inefficiencies with regards to their media planning and buying, streamline processes and collaboration with internal stakeholders and agencies, speed up the time for approvals and campaign activations as well as reduce errors and manual tasks in the management of their advertising campaigns, such as data entry errors or wrong budget allocations. The platform also uncovers potential for optimizations that drive bottom-line, top-line and green-line value.

“We are dedicated to supporting enterprises in their pursuit of operational excellence across all areas by collaborating with domain leaders in their respective areas of expertise,” said Marc Kinast, VP corporate development at Celonis. “With its mission to cover the entire advertising workflow, MINT will provide its customers with process intelligence from Celonis.”

Watch Madison Lundquist, principal research lead, process and performance management at APQC, explore process governance

Accenture invests in enhancing contact center efficiency with generative AI

Accenture has invested in Cresta, a company that has developed an AI-powered platform designed for contact centers. As part of the investment, Accenture plans to integrate Cresta’s AI software capabilities into Accenture’s AI Refinery platform which helps clients to build custom AI models that meet their unique business needs.

“Cresta’s innovative solutions have the potential to revolutionize the contact center industry by equipping customer service teams with tools they need to provide more effective customer service,” commented Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture. “The combination of Accenture’s AI Refinery platform and Cresta’s AI solutions will allow us to offer our clients enhanced tools that drive productivity by automating routine tasks, offering real-time guidance to agents and generating tailored customer interactions.”

Neutrinos launches intelligent automation marketplace for insurance

Technology company Neutrinos launched a new intelligent automation marketplace to jumpstart automation journeys across the insurance value chain. The marketplace offers insurance enterprises access to an ever-expanding library of pre-built solutions on the Neutrinos platform, fast-tracking the adoption of new capabilities across underwriting, claims processing, distribution and customer engagement, according to a press release.

“We are excited about the marketplace because it helps our customers achieve business value faster and frees their teams' bandwidth,” said Suresh Chandrasekharan, chief technology officer at Neutrinos. “For years we’ve helped insurance enterprises maximize the value of our platform to improve productivity, decision-making, customer experience and now to embed AI across the value-chain.”

Watch thought leader Doug Shannon discusses the impact of AI on intelligent automation

Esker adds new generative AI capabilities to source-to-pay suite

Esker introduced new generative AI capabilities to its source-to-pay solution suite designed to deliver significant improvements in supplier response time and streamlining supplier onboarding. The AI-powered agent included in Esker Synergy AI automatically sorts and auto-generates responses based on message content from suppliers, providing an additional resource for efficiently handling enquiries such as payment status, overdue payment reminders, information updates and invoicing questions, according to a press release. Synergy AI also streamlines supplier onboarding with optimized data collection and simplified questionnaire creation process, it added.

“This not only frees up valuable time for AP [accounts payable] teams but also improves supplier relationships by delivering faster, more consistent communication, ultimately driving greater efficiency across the entire supply chain,” said Catherine Dupuy-Holdich, source-to-pay product manager at Esker.

Pegasystems adds AI-driven legacy discovery capabilities to enhance digital transformation

Enterprise transformation company Pegasystems Inc. announced the availability of new AI-driven legacy discovery capabilities in Pega GenAI Blueprint™ to unlock rapid digital transformation. The newly added features are designed to help businesses rethink and replace inefficient systems and applications, the vendor stated. Users can now leverage generative AI to analyze existing IT assets and quickly create new, modern, cloud-native application ‘blueprints’ that are ready to build, sidestepping lengthy discovery processes that slow projects it added.

Legacy discovery capabilities include features for analyzing workflows, process mining analysis, data definitions and integrations, Pegasystems stated. “There are only so many band-aids that IT can keep applying before their systems reach a breaking point,” commented Kerim Akgonul, chief product officer at Pegasystems. “Digital transformation is a herculean undertaking that’s typically fraught with failure. These new features in Pega GenAI Blueprint turbocharge modernization projects so organizations can finally shed their outdated tech and curb technical debt while paving the way for a future-ready business.”

Watch Nao Anthony, senior manager OPEX at Commonwealth Bank and Tariq Munir, APAC financial planning transformation lead at PepsiCo, discuss the complexities and challenges of digital transformation

WalkMe introduces new AI capabilities and scalability features

Digital adoption platform (DAP) provider WalkMe announced its fall product release introducing enhanced enterprise-grade AI capabilities and scalability features. The new additions are designed to address three key challenges businesses face in their digital transformation efforts, according to a press release. These are the growing number of enterprise applications, their increasing connectivity and complexity and friction from software-related change overwhelming enterprise resources with support requests.

To help meet these challenges, the product update includes:

A productivity boost for WalkMeX customers from new enhancements with on-demand AI assistance now available across web, desktop and mobile.
New AI adoption dashboards that increase the visibility of AI usage helping WalkMeX customers optimize AI performance and increase user adoption.
Greater multi-language support that allows global teams to use the WalkMe platform in Japanese, French and German.
WalkMe Stories that expands the impact of DAP by empowering more people to capture, share and collaborate on workflows.

WalkMe was also recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) Q4 2024 report.

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