AI Agents or “Agentic AI”

Recently, “the age of Agentic AI” was announced to be upon us. The announcement provided a look into the near future. Agents in the form of autonomous actors, leveraging potentially many different conversational AI and LLMs to accomplish common tasks, are here to help us. The perspective is of course driven by the incentives for the large investors in the field of AI development. So let’s take a look on who this is going to help and what providers of actual value adding services can do to get their piece of the pie.

Introduction

I’ve been fortunate to have obtained access to the private previews of Azure resource manager “Deployment stacks” early 2023. Now that the resource manager enhancement is general available it’s appropriate to share some of my initial experience with it. In this blog post I’ll try and explain how deployment stacks will improve working with Azure resource deployments and create a better story for managing the lifecycle of groups of resources.

Taking a walk

End of last Month I took a walk, literally. I’ve walked from the outskirts of Porto to Santiago de Compostela as part of the Camino Portuguese. For me it was a walk of just about 200 kilometers that brings you across the Via Romana XIX (the old Roman road) to Santiago.

The nice thing about walking on average about 25 kilometer a day is that it’s a simple life, that most importantly allows you to clear your mind. The daily routine is like this: “wake up at around 6:00AM, gather your belongings in a backpack, put on sunscreen, check if you’re wearing appropriate attire for the start of the day, check to see if you have enough water, put on your socks and shoes, pick up the backpack and go!”. That’s it, walk until you think you’ve done enough, check-in to an auberge and chill out + repeat. All while enjoying the scenery you pass through and of course have a taste of the local food and drinks, and all the conversations with others on the pilgrimage. A lovely way to break out of the daily office life, I can highly recommend.

This is about people in the first place

The past few weeks, the news has been littered with tech-industry lay-offs and the apparent need to “battening down the hatches” for the looming recession. My first thoughts are with the people involved and I’d like to express my sympathy for those who’ve been layed off. Especially those who’ve lost their job without consideration for the value they add, which seems random, unfair and a mistake from the leadership involved. That’s harsh and inconsiderate. The damage that will do to the people involved and those who remain behind should not be underestimated. In short, it sucks for all involved.

No more safe bets

In the olden days there was a saying in our industry stating something along the lines of: “You don’t get fired for buying IBM”. This pointed to the then well established compute services IBM had on offer that provided a good fit for the compute problems at that time. Since most software originated from one vendor, integration was fairly straight forward or even by default provided, although proprietary standards were used. In the currently diverse compute landscape in our industry, such a “solid choice” doesn’t exist any longer. We continuously see new standards emerging, tech stacks maturing and seemingly good bets being super-seeded rapidly by new waves of innovation. So given this, what should a CTO do?