Two Wednesdays ago, I was getting some of my daily steps on the 14th deck of the Celebrity Ascent which had sailed from Barcelona. I greeted “good morning” to a gentleman passing me. He stopped and said “Not a good, but a great, morning”. I presumed he was a fellow Floridian as we were headed to Ft. Lauderdale and we started a quick conversation. He was actually from California and he poured out what exactly he thought about his Governor and his state. Over the next couple of days, I had many similar conversations with others we had met on the ship about the US elections. I would preface the conversations with a simple question "Are you glad or sad?" Most said glad about the election results, sad about the cruise ending.
I am a registered Independent and tend to have low expectations of politicians in Washington, DC. I had written this blog post My 10 asks of the next POTUS in early August and had been disappointed that neither candidate had focused much on policy matters. As it is now becoming clear, Kamala spent too much on celebrities and campaign cosmetics and Trump on rah rah rallies. Entertaining but content-light.
My 10 points had called for
• Reduce our National Debt which has spiraled in the last decade
• Deliver trade surpluses after decades of deficits
• Make us an energy innovator with next-gen nuclear, carbon capture etc
• Get serious about “affordable” healthcare and delver much better outcomes
• Tie immigration to our talent needs – we have a process which works but that we have ignored
• Take care of our aging baby boomers
• Quit spilling our young blood in faraway places
• Be fluent in STEM – our leaders need to celebrate and highlight the wide US STEM leadership
• Celebrate the nuclear family – I have a nuanced point of view on why we have created our distorted population pyramid
• Re-prioritize common sense – we have paid too much attention to activists and ideologues
Clearly, I have tall expectations which call for disruptors to divert the trajectory in each area. However, I figured I would mostly hear celebratory talk from Trump till he took office in late January.
So, I have been blown away by how quickly he is assembling his core team . I like many of them – Elon, Vance, Vivek, Burgum, Tulsi, RFK Jr, Rubio, Lutnick, Kristii, Hegseth,Wright. Many are youngish, entrepreneurial and importantly they are STEM savvy. They can clearly be disruptors. Match them to my 10 “asks”.
In response, I have also heard an equal and opposite reaction to them from many defending the status quo.
My career has thrived on disruption in the tech sector. I helped clients replace mainframe applications with client server flavors at PwC and Gartner. At Deal Architect I helped a number of clients with due diligence around offshore development in emerging economies around the world. I have helped clients move to cloud applications, evaluate hyperscalers replacing propriety data centers and outsourcers, evaluate benefits of automation from robotics to now Gen AI. I have seen global economies ebb and flow in my travels across 75 countries. I have seen verticals dramatically transform over the last few years, many with brand new competitors. It shows in the massive changes in vendor portfolio over the last two decades of Deal Architect and in our family budget – especially in telecoms, financial services, travel and retail.
Disruptors are by definition bulls in a china shop. They leave behind winners and losers. They inevitably face resistance to change. But life and business goes on, and usually gets better.
I have learned to present pros and cons, logically not ideologically, when I invited to. It definitely helps that I have spent time with countless execs for books like “Business as Unusual”. I have learned from others talk about a ‘Fail Faster” culture. A CEO once told me “Never offer a Plan B. Burn the boats behind you.”
We are entering a phase of great disruption. Like most, I am anxious. But I am also excited.
A conversation with Satya
Satya Nadella of Microsoft has been in the press quite a bit recently with his comments that we have moved to the age of digital agents and they will cause the end of SaaS and broadly other business applications, which he says essentially only provide skin deep services front-ending databases – create, replace, update, delete (CRUD)
Whenever I hear “end of” or “death of” something, it triggers for me two other thought leaders:
In their defense, both Fukuyuma and Carr were pointing to inflection points, not “endings”. So I would read Satya with a similar lens – he is pointing to a transition point, not a wall we are about to crash into.
And Satya is only pointing to the obvious. As I wrote in From BOPS to FAANG to the Magnificent Seven enterprise application vendors and their services partners have gradually but precipitously slipped in market leadership over the last 3 decades.
Satya has certainly earned the right to opine on the trajectory of the industry. Watch this fascinating conversation with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner. Satya has taken the Azure cloud business from $1 to 66 billion in revenues. He has added $3 trillion to Microsoft’s market cap. His early investment in OpenAI was brilliant. He is humble enough to talk of the “winner’s curse” where competitors can sneak up, duplicate success in a heartbeat. But the really intimidating part for his competitors is towards the end when they talk about model scaling and over 60 data centers across the globe and massive capex spend of nearly $70 billion in 2025. No wonder Satya mostly names his Mag 7 compatriots (he alludes to the Mag 8 to include OpenAI) like Elon, Jensen, Sam and Mark in his comments, not any of the application vendor execs.
I have met Satya a couple of times, and would love the opportunity to take the conversation further with more of an application and business use case perspective : who would train the new world of agents, where would the training data be sourced from, where are we going to provision the humongous energy needed to run power hungry GPUs and data centers etc.
Here are 5 areas I would love to discuss with him given the changes the new US administration is likely to bring to the global economy, and based on research we did for the fiction book we have just released, The AI Analyst
Would love to get Satya’s perspective on the coming changes in our industry from his perch. I loved his demeanor in the Bill and Brad show. It was an unusually long session but he came across so comfortable, confident and articulate. A true industry leader.
January 07, 2025 in Agentic AI, Energy trends, Globalization and Technology, Humanoid Robots, Industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, AMR, others), Industry Commentary, The AI Analyst - a fiction thriller, Vertical Markets (Banking, Retail etc) | Permalink | Comments (1)