SE05E07 - Time to rethink the Content Lifecycle (and other stuff)

The forty-first episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). Alan's back with Matt this month to talk Microsoft Frontier Company, Intelligent Content Loops, and the things that Salesforce thinks are holding back prospective Agentforce customers.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: New Frontier?

First up in what is Season 5 Episode 7 (not 6 as Matt says) and via unplanned sandwich chat, is a discussion about the recently announced Microsoft Frontier Company, which isn't going to be selling furs and timber in the 18th century as the name might suggest, but instead consulting services to organizations that need help learning to love Copilot to the extent that Microsoft thinks they should. As Matt says, you could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft might be taking our Work Intelligence research on board, but it's disappointing that isn't the case once you get into the details. Alan plays his cliché card by (correctly) mentioning "People, Process and Technology," and there's a discussion about how it's a shame the company has forgotten it has SharePoint and Power Automate.

Topic 2: Intelligent Content Loop

Small/mini/micro AI models are fashionable again and seemingly being termed "House Models," and Deep Analysis has been rather keen on them and their likely usage in enterprises for a few years, as Matt points out. Alan's been thinking long and hard about how information/knowledge/content management lifecycles need to be rethought in the age where documents are no longer always consumed as documents, but as pieces of information embedded in AI models. The result is the "Intelligent Content Loop", which describes a new lifecycle that is cognisant of its use in AI models (or vector stores for RAG implementations). Alan runs through it phase by phase, and explains that we'll be making it available to subscribers very soon and everyone else after that. So stay tuned.

Topic 3: Fear, change and debt

Matt attended Salesforce's Agentforce World Tour in London last month and shared some thoughts on what he learned from the experience. Primarily, he wants to discuss the three factors that Salesforce exec Joe Inzerillo cited as reasons customers find Agentforce difficult to swallow. Alan points out that those three - fear founded upon a general uncertainty around the technology, issues of change management, and technical debt - are true not just for Salesforce customers, but for business application customers in general, regardless of platform. As Matt mentions, getting customers to use new technology is indeed the classic "Crossing the Chasm" challenge, and that the technical debt as a result of vibe coding (and all those related issues) needs to be discussed properly in a future pod, but that there's a danger of being caught telling customers that their organization is the primary issue with them not getting AI and agents. The reality is that the primary customers are often those already confident with automation, which doesn't help broaden the reach to parts of organizations that haven't used automation before.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf4P_xOW_jU 

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 7
Microsoft Frontier Company: AI engineering that amplifies and protects your intelligence (Microsoft blog post).
Matt's rather excited LinkedIn post on the subject.
AI Street's "Rise of the House Models" post.
Dan's 2023 post on ChatGPT that talks about Small Language Models, his 2024 post about how small models were popping up to be industry-specific (and prevent "hallucinations"), and Matt's post a little while later speculating that unstructured data management might be significantly important here.
Matt's blog post from Salesforce's Agentforce World Tour London.