I’ve spent many years in high-tech leadership, having worked in several product marketing and analyst relations roles. I’ve overseen rebranding campaigns, new product launches, and messaging strategies, working with many teams focused on delivering products that bridge multiple architectures and deployment strategies. My experience has been primarily from a perspective of enterprise software. This includes understanding buyer personas, value propositions, and how to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership. More recently, I’ve begun working in the hardware and chip development industry, in the area of AI semiconductor design. Interestingly, I see more parallels today between the software and hardware industries – a convergence I attribute to the increasing influence of AI.
Now the direction is to orchestrate AI capabilities across hardware and software platforms. This shift is an “agentic” transformation. This wasn’t always the case. In September 2024, Salesforce was an early pioneer in taking a software approach to building agents. One of their Dreamforce 2024 tracks, Build Innovative ISV Apps with Agentforce, discussed how “ISV partners can build Agents and actions for Agentforce using Apex, flows, and prompt templates.”
I don’t recall any conversations about taking an agentic strategy to hardware back in 2024, but I might have missed it! My focus at that time was on closely monitoring the field service management vertical of the enterprise software stack.
Continue reading Will AI Shatter the Old Walls Between Software and Hardware?