Microsoft’s Dev-Centric Agentic Al Strategy, Build 2025 | Tech Field Day News Rundown: June 11, 2025

There was a big tech conference this week, and I'm not talking about Apple's, ww DC I'm talking about Microsoft Build, where we heard a lot about Agentic ai. That's the key story here on the rundown this week, where we're also gonna be talking about Snowflake acquiring a crunchy data platform. Broadcom launching the next generation Tomahawk ethernet switch, the EU checking out Broadcom's VMware licensing, IBM's new data platform capabilities, Amazon's $20 billion build out in Pennsylvania, and IBM's Starling quantum computers.

All that. And more on this episode of the Tech Field Day News rundown. Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown, where each time we meet, we run down the IT news of the week with a variable degree of snarkiness.

I'm your host, Stephen Foskett, and joining me today as co-host is Mr. Alistair Cook. Al uh, I guess maybe I'm the one who should be welcomed to the show.

It's been a while. It has been. Stephen, we have, have missed you.

Tom and I, and, and our various guests who filled in. While things are being pretty busy at Tech Field Day, have have definitely missed you. Welcome back on National Corn Cob Day National Coin Cob Day.

Also a very important one, national Forklift Safety Day. And if you're saying Forklift Safety day, what's the deal with that? As someone who's driven a forklift, let me tell you, those things are freaking scary.

It's really easy to drive that thing right through a wall. And don't ask me how I know that. Have you ever driven a forklift through a wall?

I have never driven a forklift at all, let alone through a wall. Although I did at one stage work with somebody who taught the safety training courses here in New Zealand. Um, and did, did somebody try to kill you with a forklift?

Thankfully not. Although the YouTube videos of people making mistakes with forklifts, backing them off loading ramps or knocking over huge amounts of racking, uh, make for entertaining viewing, if you can't find anything that you want to view again on the Tick Field Day YouTube channel, Yeah. Uh, just imagine driving your car in reverse.

Um, it's bizarre. Okay, moving on. Um, also, uh, appropriately it is National Call Your Dr.

Day. Um, so there's that. So Al, let's dive into the news of the week.

Uh, snowflake is acquiring crunchy data for about $250 million to enhance its AI ambitions by integrating PostgreSQL into its platform, enabling developers to build, deploy, and scale AI agents more efficiently. This move, uh, positions Snowflake for stronger competition in the AI data platform space, aligning with similar moves by Databricks and reinforcing its strategy to become a comprehensive enterprise AI backbone. Al, what's your take on the crunchiest of data?

Well, crunching your data is what AI is all about. And so maybe just adding the name, uh, crunchy data to, to, uh, snowflake is going to bring all of the AI to the, uh, to the a Uh, I think it is fairly significant that we're seeing a growth in platforms that combine structured and unstructured data to feed into your AI platforms, as well as being output from your AI platforms. And so the idea of pipelining data through AI, that we're gonna generate data out of ai, we're gonna generate, uh, both model data, but also we're gonna generate business data out of ai and having this location where we can reference all of it, it's a little more of the ideas of those data lakes and data warehouses we've worked with in the past, but now adding this, this idea of having AI as a central first class citizen, as the reason that we're actually delivering these large amounts of data.

Uh, in terms of acquisitions, snowflake, uh, has been building out a set of tools to make it easier for developers to build AI applications. Um, it's nice to see more open source products be embraced in here, and hopefully we'll see more contribution to the open source project. Uh, we do see a lot of Postgres being used as a store for Vector data.

So when we're using, uh, retrieval augmented generation, um, um, an essential part is a Vector database, and Postgres is one of the tools that is pretty popular for doing that. So Snowflake is definitely aiming at getting developers to use their collection of tools together to build the, the things they need for ai. And we definitely see a need for more integrated platforms for the simpler experiences of building AI into your application.

So I think this is a, a really good thing to see. Um, full compatibility, backwards compatibility, you know, all of the, the openness part is gonna be an interesting thing to watch over time. So seeing that we continue to see contributions to, uh, upstream Postgres, uh, and that the features that are gonna be enhancing the Snowflake platform are available to maybe not snowflake's customers directly.

Of course, snowflake will be showing a lot of value in getting it from them, getting it as a first party, well supported, integrated solution. Uh, but it is important when we're talking about open source products to remember that the source code should be coming back up, and development should be benefiting a community as a whole. It's not a straight up commercial, uh, movement.

4 terabits per second of bandwidth on a single chip designed for LA large AI data centers that connects thousands of GPUs quickly and efficiently using advanced routing and energy saving features. The chip aims to replace proprietary tech like InfiniBand with open ethernet standards and helps build faster and more flexible AI networks. 2 T last year.

It's interesting to see the 102 T this year. Stephen, is this a revolution or an evolution? Well, I, I think Broadcom wants it to be a revolution, but frankly, uh, this is, let's say, uh, continuing the march of progress that they have already made with their Tomahawk series.

If you're not familiar with the Tomahawk, as Alistair mentioned, uh, we did get a look at it, uh, actually back, uh, we looked at the Tomahawk five, uh, back in 20 22, 23, uh, as well as at our cloud Field day event in 2024, where we got a kind of a deep dive into what this is all about and how Tomahawk can be used to accelerate AI and cloud workloads. It should come as no surprise to anyone who watched that like Al did, and I did that a Tomahawk six was on the way, and here it is. Uh, it has sort of the requisite improvements that you would expect from the next generation switch.

It's built on the three nanometer process from TSMC. Uh, it's, as you said, twice as fast in terms of switching capacity in a single chip, double the bandwidth. Uh, one of the features or factors that, that I want to call attention to is one of the things that you said there, though, and that's the certis.

So here's the thing, uh, many of us, um, are even in the tech industry unaware of the importance of the certis, which is literally the way that these, uh, interfaces connect with, uh, other chips. The ethernet certis roadmap is extremely, extremely strong, extremely high, high performance. And the reason is because so many of the processors out there have plenty of ethernet bandwidth, even if they appear to have plenty of PCIE bandwidth ethernet is really sort of the king of the castle and the Tomahawk six as a ethernet inter interconnect for HPC and AI workloads makes sense mainly because of that sort of synergy between the, um, ethernet, uh, certis and the processors that are being used out there.

So when you look at interconnect technologies, one of the things that you should ask yourself or ask the vendor is, is this sort of ethernet flavored, or is this sort of PCI express flavored? And frankly, uh, as much as it's, uh, you know, maybe surprising for people to learn, the ethernet flavored interconnects and certis, uh, like the things that are supported by the tomahawk are, um, frankly, uh, there's more of them. They're higher performance, there's more bandwidth.

And that means that essentially you're gonna get more performance for less from those. So, uh, by introducing this next generation tomahawk, by doubling the bandwidth, by, uh, you know, supporting a hundred gig and 200 gig certis, what it means is that, uh, Broadcom is going to continue to cement itself as the central interconnect, not just for networking, but for HPC and AI applications, simply because, uh, they're taking advantage of the fact that this is the dominant standard out there. So it's really great to see Broadcom pushing forward on this.

Um, is it a revolutionary? Well, it's great. Uh, I don't know if it's revolutionary.

I don't know if it's unprecedented, but I'll tell you what, they're gonna sell a ton of these things simply because it's super fast, and frankly, it represents the next generation of connectivity. A European cloud group is criticizing Broadcom for sharply raising VMware prices and making licensing more rigid after its acquisition. Some costs have gone up by as much as 1500% putting pressure on smaller cloud providers.

The group warns that this could break the EU competition laws and is urging regulators to step in and push for fairer more flexible pricing. Alistair, uh, what do you think about, uh, regulators stepping in on VMware pricing? Well, we see lots of precedent for regulators stepping in where there is a clear, dominant player who is using their market position in a, an aggressive way.

The funny thing here is that we know that Broadcom is really doing the opposite. They're trying to own less of the market and only own the profitable part. So this particular story comes from the European Cloud competition observatory, whose job is to look at the cloud sector across Europe.

And of course, European regulation is typically much more intense on organizations on, on businesses than US regulation. And this particular report was looking at whether the changes to VMware's licensing were impacting customers of cloud providers and lots of companies, many organizations, uh, who are providing cloud services use VMware as their foundation. That absolutely carved out a huge amount of the service provider space, whether it's all over the lifetime of, of VMware prior to the Broadcom acquisition.

We know that Broadcom has made decisions around shifting towards all licensing being a subscription, so a annual or monthly cost, uh, and that it is a fixed cost for that, that cycle. Uh, what the, uh, this commission has seen is between 800 and 1500% increases in the, the cost for cloud providers. These are cloud providers who previously might have had a licensing agreement that was a, a, a kind of a back to back deal, where if they sold capacity to the cloud provider's customers, that was when they played pay to VMware.

And so the consumption based licensing has shifted away to being the same subscription based licensing that enterprise organizations are dealing with. That shift completely changes the economics of the cloud provider's business because it becomes a, a fixed cost to deliver the VMware infrastructure rather than a variable cost that's coupled to your income, uh, that has threatened the profitability, the viability of, uh, a collection of cloud services in in Europe. And so this is the, the challenge, uh, one of the elements that's highlighted in the report is that the same challenges have occurred with other providers of, of infrastructure software.

And that, uh, the issue here is that Broadcom has just failed to engage, has been on a take it or leave it. This is what we're doing, and that has rubbed things the wrong way up in Europe. I think there's some interesting context for this, and I wanted to particularly highlight that.

Very recently, VMware announced their profitability, so revenue up 20% year on year in their Q2 results. Um, income ramped up 124% year on year. And so Broadcom's changes are producing what Broadcom said that would do that.

VMware is more profitable, but because it's focusing on the customers that are profitable, uh, and it's making the unprofitable customers profitable, I kind of have this feeling that VMware, well, Broadcom Topan is, is here to make, make business, make things successful, and is perfectly happy to cut off these customers who are not actually as profitable as, as core customers. And that the take it or leave it approach is going to continue. Uh, I would be interested to see whether there is a mechanism in the European law that allows a legislative control a control of pricing for a commercial organization like this.

Uh, as long as the contracts that have being offered are being honored, and we've seen with at and t some challenges around that in the past, uh, as long as the contracts are being honored, I am really not sure that this, it, it, uh, interference by a a regulatory organization is actually gonna bear any long-term benefit. Whether it just makes these cloud providers who have bet their business on VMware, um, gives them more drive to move off VMware or get out of the market, that's not successful for them. IBM has upgraded its data platform with new AI driven features, surprise AI features, uh, including real-time data integration tools for handling unstructured data, faster data processing, and better monitoring.

These updates aim to make managing and analyze data easier and more efficient, especially in hybrid cloud environments that, well, Steven, these are hybrid cloud. It's pretty normal in the enterprise, and that's where IBM is selling most things. Yeah, this is, uh, well, I guess to be expected from IBM.

So just to give a little bit of background, at IBM think the company really focused on ag agentic ai, I know surprise and introduced a whole lot of agentic AI features, uh, including, uh, a whole catalog of AI agents from Orchestrate that allow, uh, companies to deploy prebuilt agents for various domain specific uses like HR and sales and so on. Um, it also integrates with all sorts of other third party tools like SAP and Oracle and AWS and allows companies to, um, access AI in a way that frankly matches their, um, enterprise needs if they're IBM customers. Well, one of the things that we heard about, uh, well all year long, but especially at, uh, the Q Click Connect event that we recently attended was the need for, um, ai, uh, that fed from unstructured data, uh, and also, uh, this whole world of data lakes and how you can integrate data lakes with ai.

Essentially, businesses have, um, plenty of applications that they can feed from. They have plenty of structured data, but really what they need to do is they need to start integrating all the other data in, in terms of, uh, you know, files, uh, documents, all that sort of thing, along with these massive data lakes that they're putting together. And, and that's what IBM is doing here.

So essentially we've got integration for various, uh, intelligence platforms that allows, uh, the gen AI capabilities that IBM has already shown us at think, uh, through Watson's next data, and, um, integrates it further with unstructured and data lake environments. So essentially, companies can start, uh, querying their massive amounts of unstructured data as well, uh, as their, um, you know, other structured analysis and, uh, retriever augmented generation or rag, which uses, uh, files, uh, in file servers. So the whole thing makes a lot of sense.

Uh, this is exactly the sort of thing that IBM customers need. Uh, and frankly, this goes along with a lot of the research that we're hearing from the future of intelligence side, which shows that companies really want to have a large, trusted partner that can help them move forward in this AI space. They need somebody who can assure them that what they're going to be deploying is gonna be trustworthy and is going to, uh, be capable of integrating with applications.

And that's the sort of reassurance that IBM is offering with watsonx. Essentially, IBM's customers are hungry for a partner like IBM to take them by the hand and say, look, here are some AI agents you can deploy. These are safe, these are proven, these work.

Here is a way that you can integrate with your data lake. It works. It's proven.

Here's a way that you can pull in on structured data. It works. It's not gonna, you know, hallucinate, it's not gonna be putting things in the public cloud.

So from that perspective, it really makes sense that IBM is leaning into this, and I'm glad that they are. We look forward to learning a lot more about what IBM is doing in the future here, simply because, you know, companies like, uh, like them are leading the way in the enterprise. Uh, for integration of ai.

Amazon Web Services is investing $20 billion in Pennsylvania to build two major data center campuses focusing on ai. One of them is near Philadelphia, and another is powered by a connected nuclear plant in Susquehanna. The project is expected to create about 201,250 tech jobs and support thousands more indirectly.

It's part of AWS's broader effort to expand cloud infrastructure for ai. Though the use of nuclear energy has raised some regulatory questions, Al uh, Amazon is expanding all around the world. Um, is this any different from any of the other announcements they've Made?

Well, I think Amazon has always been expanding the footprint. This has been a consistent story. As I was teaching AWS training courses for a few years, there were always new regions, new data centers being opened up.

And so I don't think in itself the fact that AWS is continuing to build out their public cloud as, as any surprise to anyone. I think there's some interesting elements in this, that there is a commitment to a large build out in Pennsylvania that's surrounded by a commitment to upskilling a a population to fit that. And this, I think, is where that 1,250 new high school jobs is a, a really important thing for Pennsylvania.

Uh, and this is probably the, the character sweeten the deal for Pennsylvania to allow the use of, um, high density power, particularly those nuclear power supplies are, uh, definitely contentious. I know AWS and Google both wanted to do small scale and nuclear and have put those plans on a little bit of a back, back burner. The idea that AWS is going to bring that set of skills in bring the training starting all the way down at, at K 12 schools through professional education, uh, through a range of different skill sets in here, I think is really significant for it.

So this idea of supporting STEM education, uh, bringing more digital skills, these are the kinds of skills that the future workforce of the United States require, and that as more and more things are, uh, continuing to be augmented by ai, uh, we're gonna need to have skills to use those ais also to, to continue to build out the infrastructure around them. So yes, there's, there's an element of AWS is looking after itself by building a workforce that is skilled in a location where maybe there isn't as much demand for that workforce as if they were building this somewhere around the, the West Coast. Uh, but I think it's also really good to see a commitment to a community that will definitely benefit from this.

This is a huge investment in engineering and a huge investment in the people of Pennsylvania. Um, it is continuing, uh, continuing investment that support for skills and training is the really cool stuff. It includes things like training on splicing fiber optic cables that are interconnecting everything, uh, but data center operations and, uh, some of the early stage educations, getting younger people reengaged in science and technology.

I know I was watching the news here in New Zealand, but there is a declining interest in technology for people who are in, in high school here in New Zealand. I dunno if that's mirrored in the United States. Uh, it's definitely a concern for our future productivity as a a, as a culture and as a society that is centered around these technologies.

So definitely the idea of of bringing on local communities, uh, having a fund for local initiatives as well. It's not just AWS owned in here. There is a, uh, $250,000 fund that is funding local community, uh, education and, and science technology.

So it's not all being dictated from on higher supporting grassroots, which I think is really fundamental. Uh, is $20 billion worth of investment huge? Well, it depends over how long, uh, AWS has invested, uh, reportedly $140 billion in their infrastructure in the last, uh, 25 years.

20 billion is a significant number, but it depends whether that's over the next 10 years or the next two. Uh, hopefully Pennsylvania is gonna benefit from this, and we'll see people coming into high paying jobs and technology that are very satisfying to us. IBM announced it will build a fault tolerant quantum computer called styling by 2029, aiming to run complex tasks with around 200 reliable qubits.

The system will use new error correction models to solve stability issues that limit today's quantum com computing machines. The move marks a shift from research to real world engineering as IBM races. To become the leader in quantum computing is 200 reliable qubits can actually mean that quantum encryption is absolutely essential for a student.

Well, um, let's focus on what IBM is building here along with some clever bird, uh, code names. Um, I'm sad that they didn't use p techie techie as one of their, uh, bird names, but what can you do? Um, as we know, uh, one of the, uh, challenges of quantum computing is getting enough qubits to make a practical computer.

Essentially, we have created, um, it looks as though we've created, um, quantum bits that can be used to perform calculations. The problem is we don't have a lot of them, and it's very hard to connect them in a way that we do with conventional microprocessors. You're probably familiar with the sort of so many billion, so many trillion transistors discussions when they talk about, uh, my modern CPUs and graphics cards.

Well, quantum is, uh, not in the millions, billions, or even thousands of, uh, qubits right now, and that's gonna cause challenges, uh, in terms of getting actual work out of quantum computers. So, IBM has developed a couple of really cool things. Number one, um, they just published a paid paper, which actually was the, the cover article in nature about quantum low density parody check codes.

Uh, essentially as a storage nerd, I know a little bit about parity checks, and the idea is that you want to build a, um, a way to mathematically prove that your, uh, data is correct. If you can do this in a quantum computer, then it allows you, theoretically to create a more reliable computer and scale that computer past what previous quantum computers have been able to do. And that's exactly what IBM is gonna be doing here.

The next thing that they're going to be doing is, um, well, first they're gonna be building a, um, a test, uh, architecture. And they're calling this loon since it will be a solo chip that will implement the QL DPC coating in order to just test to make sure that these things can work. And also that these cubits can communicate over, uh, longer distances, like let's say, lonely Canadian Lake, where the loon is calling out and no one is answering, because right now we only have one in 2026 IBM expects to launch kookaburra, uh, which will be a modular processor that will take this to the next level.

And, uh, those people on the other side of the planet, hey, Al, um, who are familiar with this bird, know that it tends to holler and tweet and make all sorts of noise. Well, that would be the idea that IBM would have modular processors that would allow them to theoretically scale quantum computing. Next up would be c**k two, which will entangle these CBER modules and enable these multiple modules to connect together like nodes in a, uh, modern, uh, scalable, uh, scale out system.

And then ultimately they're saying in 2029, they'll have a, uh, a, a a, not a computer so much, but a cluster of quantum, uh, computers called Starling. And it would have effectively, uh, thousands of, uh, times more capability than the current quantum computers. It would have, um, you know, incredible amounts of, um, of computing power.

And it would theoretically, to your point, allow us to use quantum computing to do things that we never could do before. Like, I don't know, let's say solve the traveling salesman problem or break quant, you know, your conventional, uh, encryption algorithms or, you know, maybe, uh, you know, whatever. And, and they're calling it Starling because starlings, of course, travel in massive flocks.

I think they're called flocks. Uh, somebody correct me on that. And, um, that's sort of what IBM is gonna do here.

They're gonna deploy a massive scale out cluster of these quantum chips. So I am not a quantum expert. I am a quantum enthusiast, and I cannot wait to talk to my friend Dr.

Bob Sutor, uh, formerly of IBM Quantum, actually, uh, to learn a little bit more about this. This is just cool, nerdy stuff, and, and I hope that it, I hope that it works. Now let's take a look at a bigger story.

Uh, this week we saw, uh, Apple's, uh, worldwide developer conference, or as my iPhone insists on calling it wwdc. Yeah, apple manually overrode Siri to make it say that we also saw more important stuff, including Microsoft Build and at Microsoft Build, they talked a lot about agentic ai as we have here. On the rundown, it seems that Microsoft is, uh, contrary to Apple, leaning into, uh, AG agentic AI leaning into AI generally, and making it central to their overall strategy.

Uh, Satya and Adela talked about the Ag agentic web, where AI takes a big role in software development. Uh, we also heard more about, uh, advances in GitHub, copilot, making it into a real programming partner for developers. Uh, new features for managing AI agents and giving them identities and security controls.

And, um, Microsoft, uh, unsurprisingly backed to open standards like agent to agent or A to a and MCP, which is something that I've been talking about quite a lot lately. The event, uh, highlighted how AI is going to be a new tool for developers. It's going to challenge everything that people know about, uh, productivity and development.

But of course, uh, success on this depends on how people use these tools and whether they really trust them. So, Al uh, what's your overall take on Microsoft's messages coming out of build? I think the, the ambition to have an, an AI that is an assistant like a human.

We've seen this through science fiction for a very long time of actual computers doing thinking tasks in service of a human, but offloading a lot of the routine tasks that we don't really want to have to think about. And this is the core of what, uh, Microsoft is saying. They want to have, they want to have, uh, a gen AI that can take on particular actions, specific actions and complete them autonomously, um, but do so in a way that is under human control at some point.

Uh, we got some great coverage of Microsoft build from the future, uh, analyst group, uh, Mitch, actually, Nick patients and Keith Kirkpatrick, all good friends of ours. Uh, were at the event and have, have written up some really extensive coverage. One of the things I picked out of it was the use of copilots, um, as a, a tool, as a peer programming tool.

Now, I remember peer programming as, as being, uh, something that, that came out of Pivotal and Cloud Foundry kind of days when I was working with VMware. And the idea that having one person writing the code, another, looking over their shoulder to see if they're making mistakes, uh, was interesting. But two humans doing that is kind of tough to do culturally, having an AI assistant, an agent that's looking over my shoulder and saying, Hey, you, you haven't checked that, the input you got from the user is actually valid before you passed it on to this other service.

That might be a really useful thing to have, particularly in real time, because fixing these things in real time is so much easier than having a, a, a security scan later on telling me that I made a mistake four hours ago. So I like this idea. Another thing that I also saw in there was Microsoft admitting that they don't have all the answers here, and that they're gonna engage with their developer community, their communities through GitHub.

And again, discover the answers to this. Discover the ways in which people want to actually use AI, and how AI agents can make individual developers more productive. And I think this is, uh, quite a change.

Again, seeing this awareness that the knowledge is out there, the knowledge of what to do, the ideas of how to work out the right thing to do is actually out there amongst your end users, amongst the, the sort of massive number of, uh, intelligent people who are doing things with us. Of course, the challenge is getting through all of them, the millions of different opinions to get to something useful outta that. As always, when you're pulling from a, a large community.

The other element in here is the thought that, uh, so much code is being written by AI is there's still a role for a human developer. And I think pretty clearly there still is a role for a human developer. It's just that that role changes.

And in the same way we saw changes from, um, when I first started programming, uh, there, there were very few libraries to do complicated things because computers couldn't do quite so complicated things. And over time, better and more libraries turn up better development environments and shifting those development environments to allow us to do more, um, sort of the coding idea of describing what you want to achieve. Now, you probably don't go all in vibe coding because you still want some ability to work, uh, deeply have deep knowledge of the programming language, the environment you're working on, but melding some of those ideas that there are a whole lot of tasks that are repetitive and very same in software development and minimizing those so we can allow humans to do the things they're good at, which is innovating, coming up with new ideas that aren't based on prior art, right?

Automate everything that's based on prior art. And that's exactly what generative AI is good at, but allow human to innovate and build new things. Stephen, are you building new things at the moment with the help of AI to do the boring stuff?

Um, sure, and I think that this is one of the areas, uh, that is, um, maybe a little, uh, confusing of the world that we live in. Um, it's easy to be angry about ai. It's easy to be frustrated with AI simply because I feel like so many people are still in the honeymoon phase of this thing is amazing.

It does anything well, it doesn't, it really, really doesn't. For example, if you ask chat GPT-4 O about to compare and contrast agent to agent protocol and MCP, it will make up a load of, let's say horse pucky about what these things mean, including erroneous definitions of both of these protocols. Because it doesn't have that information.

It doesn't know what these things are 'cause they're that new. That being said, OpenAI, anthropic, Microsoft, et cetera, have all embraced these standards. Google announced agent to agent protocol recently.

And, um, anthropic has, um, put, uh, MCP out there as an open standard for ways that agents can integrate with each other. The contract contrast between sort of this, I'm gonna ask chat GPT stuff and it's gonna make up an answer. And where the industry is headed, it could not be more stark.

And that's good for many reasons, not the least of which, because most real AI applications are not gonna be of the burn down the rainforest and light up the nuclear reactor variety. They're gonna be a lot more, um, of the duct tape that holds things together. Variety.

And so to answer your question in a long-winded way, yes, I'm using AI all the time as duct tape. Essentially, if you, for example, need to extract data from a file, it is, uh, an LLM is actually a very good way to build a standard JSON structure based on the contents of a variety of, um, unstructured files. You know, feed it, for example, a whole bunch of, uh, invoices.

And it will give you a beautiful formatted JSON list of the content of those invoices. And in many most cases, it's gonna be pretty accurate as long as you've used the proper prompt. Well, that's what models and agents are going to give us.

Essentially, we're going to have little AI components that are able to do little cool things. When you strap these things together using protocols like agent to agent or using model context protocol, which are not mutually exclusive com competitive by the way, they, they, they certainly can and will augment each other in various ways. What we're gonna end up with is useful tools that do useful things and don't require yet another agent that is, you know, maybe or maybe not sentient.

So that I think is the direction that the industry is headed in. We talked earlier about IBM with, uh, announcing it think a whole range of AI agents that do various tiny tasks in a useful way. That's the kind of stuff that I'm excited about, uh, from Microsoft as well.

I mean, Microsoft obviously, you know, is one of the major computing, you know, personal computing platform vendors. But of course, they're also one of the most important cloud, uh, companies out there. And of course, they also, uh, have a huge, huge group of developers that support and rely on their tools, everything from GitHub to their IDs and copilot.

So having agents built into that to help out in various ways, um, and having things like GitHub embrace, um, MCP allows us to see a future where we're going to see just a blossoming of really cool little AI widgets that do neat things and all work together. And that's sort of the message that I got from, from this. And, and I have to agree with you, Alistair.

I love the fact that Microsoft is coming here and saying, look, we are not exactly sure, but we're pretty sure there's a revolution in here. Let's work together and find it. Well, thanks a lot Al for, uh, joining me today on the Rundown, or maybe I should say thank you for allowing me to join you on the rundown.

Uh, Tom is busy with, uh, Cisco live us right now. com or techron TV and watch the presentations from that. We also have a major, uh, industry event coming up that is the Six five Media Summit.

Um, of course it's focusing on ai. com and you can learn more about the summit. You can register there and you can tune in.

That's gonna be June 16th through 19th. And we'll be back with another Tech Field Day event, uh, July 9th and 10th, which is Networking Field Day. Alistair, uh, do you wanna talk at all about some of the upcoming events you've got coming?

Well, I'm also focused on AI as well, so AI infrastructure field day four is, is coming up a little way out from, uh, from that. That'll be in September as well as of course I have another cloud field. I've just come off cloud field day 23 last week, which was absolutely awesome.

We're looking forward to another Cloud Field Day once we get out into October. And around that time, Stephen, you'll be doing an AI field day, and I think it's interesting that we've separated out AI infrastructure, the things you need to build to be able to run AI from AI Field Day, where it's the things you do with AI and how AI is delivering business value. I hope we're seeing a lot of that business value at AI Field Day.

Absolutely, and, and you know, for me, that's really what I'm looking for with AI technology. Let's, let's get some value out of this stuff instead of just messing around with it and seeing if it can do cool things and fool us into thinking that it's human. Well, thanks for watching the Tech Field Day rundown.

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We'll be back next Wednesday to talk about the IT News of the week. That was, but until then, for myself, for Alistair, uh, for Tom and all of us here at Tech Field Day, here's wishing you and yours a super chocolatey corn on the COB Day.