Agentic Workflows and the Dust Up Between Microsoft and Salesforce
January 14, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The Register, a UK online publication, does a good job of presenting newsworthy events with a touch of humor. Today I spotted a new type of information in the form of an explainer plus management analysis. Plus the lingo and organization suggest a human did all or most of the work required to crank out a very good article called “In AI Agent Push, Microsoft Re-Orgs to Create CoreAI – Platform and Tools Team.”
I want to highlight the explainer part of the article. The focus is on the notion of agentic; specifically:
agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.
These words are attributed to Microsoft’s top dog Satya Nadella, but they sound as if one of the highly paid wordsmiths laboring for the capable Softies. Nevertheless, the idea is important. In order to achieve the agentic pinnacle, Microsoft has to reorganize. Whoever can figure out how to make agentic applications work across different vendors’ solutions will be able to make money. That’s the basic idea: Smart software is going to create a new big thing for enterprise software and probably some consumers.
The write up explains:
It’s arguably just plain old software talking to plain old software, which would be nothing new. The new angle here, though, is that it’s driven mainly by, shall we say, imaginative neural networks and models making decisions, rather than algorithms following entirely deterministic routes. Which is still software working with software. Nadella thinks building artificially intelligent agentic apps and workflows needs “a new AI-first app stack — one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer.”
To win the land in this new territory, Microsoft must have a Core AI team. Google and Salesforce presumably have this type of set up. Microsoft has to step up its AI efforts. The Register points out:
Nadella noted that “our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors”. That’s an odd observation given Microsoft published his letter, which concludes with this observation: “Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure. We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead, and together, I’m looking forward to building what comes next.”
Here’s what I found interesting:
- Agentic is the next big thing in smart software. Essentially smart software that does one thing is useful. Orchestrating agents to do a complex process is the future. The software decides. Everything works well — at least, that’s the assumption.
- Microsoft, like Google, is now in a Code Yellow or Code Red mode. The company feels the heat from Salesforce. My hunch is that Microsoft knows that add ins like Ghostwriter for Microsoft Office is more useful than Microsoft’s own Copilot for many users. If the same boiled fish appears on the enterprise menu, Microsoft is in a world of hurt from Salesforce and probably a lot of other outfits.
- The re-org parallels the disorder that surfaced at Google when it fixed up its smart software operation or tried to deal with the clash of the wizards in that estimable company. Pushing boxes around on an organization chart is honorable work, but that management method may not deliver the agentic integration some people want.
The conclusion I drew from The Register’s article is that the big AI push and the big players’ need to pop up a conceptual level in smart software is perceived as urgent. Costs? No problem. Hallucination? No problem. Hardware availability? No problem. Software? No problem. A re-organization is obvious and easy. No problem.
Stephen E Arnold, January 14, 2025
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