Posts by sketharaman

McKinsey says enterprise AI is finally 'on the road to ROI'

Money Quote: "It should not be surprising that it has taken time, because it is a reflection of trends we’ve seen with other technologies."

Bingo. I've been selling ERP for 30 years and I still don't know too many companies that would *publicly* acknowledge ROI from their ERP investments. The keyword is "publicly". As anybody who has worked with ROI models would know, ROI calculations touch upon many parameters about the inner workings of a company and quantitatively, not just qualitatively. Going by the truckloads of money invested by companies in new licenses, upgrades, etc. of ERP, they've surely gotten ROI from their ERP investments, just that they don't need to disclose them publicly. This has also been true for SAAS, Cloud, and many other gamechanging technologies of the last few decades. I agree with McKinsey that it won't be any different with AI.

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

zScaler

zScaler predicted this for 2024, it has happened in 2025-2026. Not bad.

Cloud Repatriation

This has already started happening to some extent e.g. https://www.uniquesolutionsit.com/case-studies/cloud-repatriation-at-commodities-exchange/. However, the catch is, migrating cloud workloads to onprem aka "cloud repatriation" or "cloud rebalancing" is only possible for IaaS and PaaS workloads but nor for SaaS workloads. When they moved from onprem to cloud in the last 10 years, many companies also moved to SAAS at the same time, so those workloads are not coming back onprem - unless the new trend of SaaS Repatriation (ditching cloud SAAS and using AI BUILD to build bespoke applications onprem) gathers traction. But, then AI token costs are also skyrocketing, so not sure if Saas Repatriation will go very far. Lots of moving parts, interesting times, and also funny times - in some companies, we see one application moving from onprem to cloud and another application is moving from cloud to onprem at the same time!

Veterans Affairs signs $1.6B deal for an army of Salesforce AI agents

Kudos!

Kudos to Oracle and Salesforce for bagging these deals. Hopefully they will create more wealth for the shareholders and employees of both companies.

Stats watchdog prescribes stronger caveats for NHS Palantir claims

Good luck to NHS for establishing causation between Palantir technology and patient outcomes. Technology projects take months, if not years, many things change, at best there can be a correlation between technology intervention and improvement in metrics between the TO-BE and AS-IS situations, I can't recall the last time a customer or vendor could freeze control variables at constant levels during the entire project duration, which is a prerequisite for establishing causation under statistical methods.

UK regulator wants Apple and Google to let devs steer clear of app store fees

Cost v. Value

Keen to know what Cost v. Value sinecure bureaucrats have. Unbridled Capitalism works. Down with regulatory overreach.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

I've always been a bit skeptical about the concept of "man in the loop" (e.g. https://x.com/s_ketharaman/status/2000562747252322572). Glad somebody came out and openly said "Humans are not terribly consistent. Like AI, they're non-deterministic".

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

Brilliant Product Category

Almost everything in the article is above my paygrade but "Token Barber" says everything I need to know!!! Spy v. Spy is how progress happens - not by constantly whining about energy, environment, ecology, blah blah blah.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

AI TACO

LOL Don has already TACOd about AI model Type Approval.

https://pin.it/1qkDBUm97

Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt

Abtruse logic, spagetti code, non-existing documentation - all ensure eternal job security of coders in overstaffed tech companies, which is to say, almost all tech companies going by the Old Silicon Valley Jungle Saying "A well run tech company is 2X overstaffed; a badly run tech company is 4X overstaffed". No wonder there's so much technical debt in software in the first place. More power to AI to flesh it out and refactor the code so that tech companies are finally able to cut their deadwood and take their MSV accomplishments to the next level.

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

+100. I wanted to become a programmer 45 years ago because it was the cool thing to do. I took coding courses in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, COBOL, etc. as a part of my engineering degree three years later. I found coding to be a major PITA and hated it. Glad AI coding tools are now available to free human beings from the drudgery of coding and still be able to build and release apps.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Man in the Loop

According to some people, the so-called "Man in the Loop" will be the fall guy for all snafus of Agentic AI. That's typically a role in the AI user org rather than the AI vendor org.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Totally agree. When I started working 40 years ago, my big boss told me, "Nothing free has any value". While FOSS and VC Subsidy have somewhat blunted that saying in the following decades, I'm not surprised that the FOSS movement is coming around to realizing that it cannot be expected to provide sustained value for free forever.

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Whither Microsoft?

When AWS and Microsoft were the most qualified vendors, why did HMRC not include Microsoft in its shortlist?

AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours

Whither hack?

I've seen a chatbot button in every McKinsey article I've read in the last few months. Whenever I've clicked it and asked questions, Lilli has answered them. When it can be accessed by the public à la ChatGPT and provides output based on McKinsey's research and reports, I'm not sure if this can even be called a hack of Lilli / McKinsey.

Lenovo, Nintendo sue US government seeking tariff refunds

Money Quote

For the avoidance of any doubt, "Supreme Court’s jurisdiction does not cover ordering refunds".

Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture

Re: I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows

Radbroke Hall was full of Accenture folks when I was there in 2007-8. I didn't know that Accenture's association with Barclays Knutsford went as far back as 1991. Whoa!

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

20% Detect Discernible Impact From AI

69% of businesses currently use AI. 20% of businesses see discernible impact from AI. For a technology that has been around for just three years, those percentages are great. IME of working in the B2B technology space for 40 years, I haven't seen better adoption or ROI numbers for any previous Wannabe Revolutionary Enterprise Technology - e.g. ERP, Web, Mobility, Cloud, Metaverse, Blockchain - at a similar stage of its product lifecycle.

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Re: Value what you can measure or measure what you value

Well said. IME of seling B2B technology for 40 years, I don't know too many companies who have publicly reported ROI for any enterprise technology in Year 3. The other day, I read here that over 60% of ERP implementations fail - this is 30 years after ERP went mainstream. Anybody who expects public data on ROI for Enterprise AI anytime soon is living in la la land. At this point, adoption and usage is all that counts, and, on that count, AI is rocking.

Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day

It is. And not just for HR software. As @byrnehobart points out, lousy UI / UX is a feature, not bug, in all enterprise software. It's how SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, et al drive vendor lockin, generate training and consulting revenues for themselves and their implementation partners.

Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please

There's no pure hardware any longer. Nowadays, many servers have lightweight software that controls the hardware, either only at installation or even on an ongoing basis. And that software can never be FOSS. It has to be supplied only by the hardware manufacturer. Using that software, it's quite possible for hardware vendor to brick the customer's server. It's somewhat like an HP printer throwing all kinds of tantrums when you use a non-HP ink / toner cartridge. Or a GE fridge bricking the fridge if you use a non-GE filter.

American company Nvidia coined the buzzword "AI Factory". The two leading companies in the world that sell "AI Factory" are American companies Dell and HPE. When they say they can't achieve digital sovereignty under public cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft and Google because they're American companies, question is, how can they achieve digital sovereignty under private cloud providers Dell and HPE, who are also American companies?

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Hope the movie has a better ending this time

USA has a long history of weaponizing its currency and technology against Rest of World. Trump is not the first POTUS to do so, he probably won't be the last POTUS to do so. The necessity for self-reliance has always been there. The question is of capability. Let's see how the self-reliance movie plays out this time.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Re: Someone with appropraite skills manages to use 'AI' in useful way !!!

Kudos for self-serving answer but "meaning" depends on the eyes of the beholder. AI is a tool that's very much useful to general public to do stuff that *they* find meaningful.

Re: Someone with appropraite skills manages to use 'AI' in useful way !!!

No RISC no return.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

In the late 90s, a leading tech analyst started all its keynote presentations with a slide titled "RIP ERP" to emphasize the role of Internet. As the Marketing Manager of an ERP company, I had to do something about it. The concept of doing business via the Internet was just gaining traction and somebody invented the term eBusiness aka eBiz. We simply changed the name of our product's category from ERP to "eApplications". It worked! After a couple of years, everybody went back to calling it ERP, and so it has been until now. Going by my experience on that instance, I propose renaming ERP to "ERP.ai". I'm sure it will work until everybody goes back to calling it ERP after a couple of years.

Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands Police chief quits over AI hallucination

Let's not single out consulting firms and cops and lawyers for submitting genAI-generated non-existent evidence. An Indian High Court recently rapped a Judge of doing the same thing. https://x.com/s_ketharaman/status/2013582984767524885/photo/1

Hong Kong’s newest anti-scam technology is over-the-counter banking

Yep, the right step.

Less than 1% of customers get scammed. To protect that 1%, 100% of customers are subject to friction. That's silly, I totally support the American way to urge those 1% to be more careful and avoid causing pain to everyone.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

ROI

In my small company, whatever little money I invested in genAI paid back for itself last year. Giants are reporting the same now: $2B in benefits on $2B in investment in AI in the case of JPMC. While genAI will not take over everything in an enterprise, it has many use cases that can deliver - or have already delivered - productivity boosts.

Delay to European Central Bank messaging project cost the Bank of England £23M

LOLOL times they're a changing!

Here we go again: Microsoft in UK court over cloud licensing

Re: Curious

+1. I'm neither European nor old enough but that was the first thought that struck me when I read the said last name. On a side note, you might want to consider filing a class action lawsuit against the said Ministry of Education for deficiency in education and tempt the same Ms. Stasi to represent your class!

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

This is the kinda thing that 800 lb chimpanzees typically leave for 8 lb add-on software providers.

Boffins: cloud computing's on-demand biz model is failing us

Well said!

Paradox: Agentic AI dev roles are less in demand as agents take over

Tattoo removal

"Forrester said it expects a number of businesses to "quietly rehire" employees that were given the elbow in the name of AI efficiency."

When I was in Germany in the early 2000s, I noticed an overabundance of tattoos and tattoo parlors. When I asked my German coworker about this, he wryly remarked "Tattoo removal will be one of the 10 hottest jobs in 10 years". Not sure how his prediction aged in 2010-5. But, going by reports of massive amounts of technical debit and slop in AI-generated code, I'm boldly predicting that "AI code removal will be one of the 10 hottest jobs in 2035".

AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession

ROI ShaROI

In my 40 years of selling B2B technology, I can't think of a single gamechanging technology that has delivered ROI within three years of launch. ERP has been around for 50 years. I can't think of too many companies that have publicly acknowledged that they've received ROI from implementing ERP. All this talk of ROI of AI is lame and betrays ignorance of how enterprise technology works. End of the day, all that matters is whether AI sells. And it does. Even companies who have said they were not impressed with their AI pilots are buying more and more AI e.g. UK Government:

"Ignoring the ROI skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with backing a raft of AI projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting." ~ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/uk_ai_regulations/.

Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

Permission optional, I guess

Somebody sued Oracle and Salesforce for EUR 10 billion in ca. 2016 for GDPR violation for a very similar data sharing case, albeit without AI. A Dutch court dismissed the lawsuit in 2022.

https://gtm360.com/blog/2024/11/27/b2b-data-sharing-by-saas-ai-whose-data-is-it-anyway/.

Let's see what happens to the next GDPR violation lawsuit, if and when one gets filed.

Cisco: Most companies don't know what they're doing with AI

ROI

"Shaky foundations mean that AI value is hard to determine too, says Cisco".

I've been selling B2B technology for 40 years and value has been hard to determine for virtually every major technology during this period e.g. ERP, CRM, Web, Cloud, Mobility, Blockchain. This is due to several reasons: (1) Technology does not have value e.g. Blockchain? (2) Technology has great value for some companies and not so much value for other companies e.g. ERP (3) To measure value, company needs BEFORE-AFTER metrics. While AFTER metrics are easy to collect, BEFORE metrics are not so easily available. That's because of the very "shaky foundations" that existed BEFORE and which companies are trying to fix by deploying the new technology. In other words, if the foundation was great, companies wouldn't need to deploy the new technology at all e.g. AOTA.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

Odd Even

Odd day: AI ain't gutting jobs.

Even day: AI is gutting jobs.

Rinse and repeat.

AI is not the first technology for which I've seen such contradictory data. AI won't be the last technology for which I'll see such contradictory data.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

"Most Scientists Use AI But Question Its Usefulness".

Yeah right. Like "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded".

These scientists are just exhibiting symptoms of Upton Sinclair Syndrome: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

More than 100 companies are chasing an AI chip gold rush. Few will surive

OMG I knew Nvidia was not the only game in town but I never thought there were over 100 wannabe AI chip manufacturers.

GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire

Hey ChatGPT: Can you scour the archives of El Reg and get data about any technology in the history of humankind that delivered ROI to 5% of its customers within 3 years of its launch?

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

Yes I'm more than willing

"Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 people. The funds Microsoft is saving from all its ex-staffers are helping to pay for Microsoft's spending $75 to $80 billion on its AI CapEx this year."

Assuming the average TC of a Microsoft employee is $250,000 p.a., the total savings from firing 15000 employees works out to $3.75B. How will that even begin to pay $75B for AI CapEx? If the devs I'm paying $250K suck so badly at maths and logic, I'd happily pay $100K to replace them with AI.

Desktop-as-a-service now often cheaper to run than laptops - even after thin client costs

Height of Delusion!

I had a quick glance at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/business/compare-plans-pricing. The cheapest plan for Windows 365 Cloud PC is $31/mo. My current ThinkPad cost me $530 and I've had it for 10 years, so the monthly price works out to less than $5/mo., which is 6X less than Cloud PC (without even adding the price of the thin client device that I'd still need in order to use CloudPC). Even by the standards of Gartner, this seems to be height of delusion!

How Google profits even as its AI summaries reduce website ad link clicks

"The search giant is putting advertisers' ads within or directly above and below AI Overviews themselves." Screenshots of a few examples would help. Personally, I have never seen an ad above or within a Google AI Overview box. While I've seen tons of ads right on top for ad-intensive search keywords like "smartphone", "digital camera", etc., I have not seen any AI Overview for them.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

RIP Tom Lehrer. Great tribute. I've known about Tom Lehrer since ca. 1980 for his Wernher von Braun song but it's only TIL that he was a mathematician.

AI creeps into the risk register for America's biggest firms

Everything Is Securities Fraud

"These risk factors skew conservative and are an indicator of corporate consciousness about external factors affecting the business world, more than a carefully calculated analysis of urgent pending threats."

Kudos to S&P 500 corporations for taking Matt Levine's "Everything Is Securities Fraud" theory seriously, and initiating CYA measures against the growing risk of being sued by activist investors for securities fraud based on any and every one of their actions, including absence of any actions.

Germany asks if US hyperscalers hold keys to AI kingdom

Did USA stop EU from developing the ethos of speed and risk-taking? If EU companies had indexed on speed and risk-taking, they might have overtaken American companies in AI. Nobody but the "slow and steady" culture of EU should be blamed for EU losing the AI race to USA (if it has lost it). But, since I don't expect too many people in EU to accept that, I'm guessing we'll see yet another exhibit of what seems to be the charter principle of EU: "Build Nothing, Regulate Everything".

Are you a big AI business vendor making terrible AI business decisions? We can help

Re: "Align your core mission with bankruptcy."

Well said. As I keep saying, only 20% of startups succeed but 100% of startups provide employment and pay salary. IMO this 5:1 ratio between fruits of unearned success and real success is the real reason why everybody incuding politicians keep talking up startups.

Snowflake finance veep says big corps migrate at a glacial pace

Yet another Cloud Bro learns the harsh realities of onprem infra the hard way!

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Resonates with my personal experience with Perplexity AI and, to some extent, Google AI Overview. In 2+ years of trying out various genAIs, I find ChatGPT to be the only product that crosses my bar of value, accuracy and UX.