Get ready for another round of enterprise highs and lows, with Brian Sommer and Jon Reed issuing their top picks (and pans) of the month, and unveil another unexpected half-time segment - deconstructing AI and recruiting, with surprise guest Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel. The three dig into the provocative prediction of the end of recruiters in six months, via Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Tinder also shares what she's learned from her own AI experiments, client deliverable, and her new AI sho...
Aug 03, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Is LinkedIn now the business TikTok? Are keynotes legacy artifacts? And why are Watch Parties the future of enterprise keynotes? Here's the full version of Jon Reed's talk with Brent Leary of CRM Playaz - where we learn why unscripted video content is more trusted - and builds buyer confidence. Note: you don't need the video version for this one, but if you want to see the before/after of Jon's camera test, check the YouTube replay at https://www.youtube.com/live/B-LHU1tp5Gw. If you enjoy unfilt...
Aug 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min
At the end of the first official day of SAP Sapphire Orlando 2025, we taped a live podcast at the ASUG Hub with questions from the audience. On the mic: Jon Reed, your host, ASUG CEO Geoff Scott and analyst Josh Greenbaum. We gave our instant keynote reactions, and discussed the topics SAP needs to address to deliver for users - at Sapphire and also beyond. Audience questions kept this one spicy, including a surprise question from Constellation analyst Holger Mueller, who was passing through the...
Jun 22, 2025•33 min
As event season winds down, prognosticators have a lot to say about the future of the enterprise. Do Jon and Brian agree, or are these fever dreams? Let's review what we've learned this spring - and where customers go from here. As always, bring your savviest and snarkiest commentary, as you are an integral part of this show.... If you want to see the slides, you can see them on the YouTube replay at: https://youtube.com/live/DiqT53hdqXY ....
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 21 min
On the final afternoon of Salesforce Connections, I catch up with Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of Valoir, to make sense of the what we just saw. Rebecca has some instructive thoughts on Salesforce's planned acquisition of Informatica - a topic we didn't hear much about at the show, but one worth discussing. We also discussed how this show compared with Valoir's prior research on Salesforce and customer adoption of agentic AI. And: what does the end of "no-reply marketing" mean, and are customers ready...
Jun 15, 2025•33 min
At Salesforce Connections 2025, Salesforce announced the Marketing Cloud Next - as the end of "do-not-reply" marketing. Is this a realistic goal for marketers? Is Marketing Cloud ready for the challenge? Time for a quick hot take from Constellation's Liz Miller, who was up for the challenge.
Jun 13, 2025•13 min
In a time-honored Sapphire 2025 tradition, I located an empty hallway and commandeered a couple of chairs to debrief on what we heard in Orlando. This time, with a new guest, Conor Riordan, Chair at UKISUG. Riordan brings a fascinating perspective to this conference review, as he's had a deep career in SAP IT leadership before moving over to the business side - and that's the gap that SAP (and all of us, really) still need to fully bridge. How well did SAP do? How did SAP's AI announcements stac...
May 25, 2025•56 min
For SAP Sapphire 2025 opening keynote, we took the old school retro chat backchannel, and turned it into a public watch party. I invited special guest commentators Bonnie Tinder and Josh Greenbaum, and it seemed to go pretty well. So for this podcast version, you can hear our pre-game keynote expectations, and then a post-game keynote wrap to see how it stacked up (the replay of most of the keynote commentary is also available on Jon Reed's LinkedIn stream). Many of the issues raised are ongoing...
May 25, 2025•24 min
Yep, it's time for another Enterprise month in review. Join us live as Jon Reed and Brian Sommer issue their enterprise picks and pans. Our special guest on the virtual couch will be HR tech PR maven Jeanne Achille, who will help us sort through vendor hype and PR gotchas and chime in on the top HR tech stories. As always, bring your snarkiest/savviest comments and questions... Note: all my podcasts are free, with no sponsors and no ads etc. If you like this unfiltered approach to enterprise con...
May 25, 2025•1 hr 15 min
With SAP Sapphire and the ASUG Annual Conference right around the corner, Jon Reed reconvened with analyst Josh Greenbaum and ASUG CEO Geoff Scott for a two part podcast. Part one: a review of SAP's ambitious Business Data Cloud announcement, what we've learned since the launch news, and the open questions heading into Orlando. Then we shift into a discussion of why so many customers have brought up the need for cloud/modernization business cases - and ways to bridge that vexing/persistent IT/bu...
Apr 06, 2025•56 min
Yes, it's time to revisit my take on AI and human creativity, with trusted foil Thomas Wieberneit, who has plenty of insights and an ability to push my arguments. I'll have some fresh slides and fresh thinking on this topic, hot takes, and make a case for why enterprises are drastically underestimating the need for human creativity, and where AI does fit in - including pros and cons of various enterprise use cases. Bring your sharpest ideas... And note: the slides are not necessary to enjoy this...
Apr 06, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Active Inference AI is not necessarily in conflict with LLMs, but Active Inference is definitely a different approach - one that challenges AI assumptions and opens up new thinking. It's been almost six months since Denise Holt shook up Constellation's Connected Enterprise event with a keynote on how Active Inference AI is changing the field. Since then, much has happened. In this audio-only podcast, Jon Reed gets the latest from Denise Holt, including upcoming Active Inference and Spatial Web m...
Mar 23, 2025•31 min
Yep, it's time - Brian Sommer and Jon Reed are back with the high and lows of the enterprise month, and your own salty commentary. Let's do this! Note - this is the first show of the year so there is a lot to cover, including a research dive into the flaws of LLMs and RAG/agent evaluation, and the status of the AI copyright situation. We attempt to give a new take on the return-to-office debate - and the online audience manages to get both of us to blow gaskets at different points. Note: the sli...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Eric Kimberling wrote a must-read post on the pros and cons of customization - and the debate is joined. In this special "blogs that matter" edition, we'll drill into Eric's analysis, and then take up some critical points customers should be aware of. As always, bring your sharpest and snarkiest viewpoints, your live comments are part of this show. If you appreciate unfiltered enterprise content without any attempts at monetization that is intentionally ad free and unsponsored, please consider g...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr 9 min
On the final afternoon of a whirlwind ZohoDay 2025 analyst event, I finally got a live sit down with Brian Sommer after a couple of near misses. The topics on deck: did Zoho make its enterprise case? And how different/effective is its AI strategy? We took a bit of extra time to delve into Zoho's interesting-and-provocative AI messaging in the aftermath of DeepSeek. (Zoho's Sridhar Vembu considered these disruptions of "big AI" significant enough to refer to this phase of AI as "After DeepSeek.")...
Feb 09, 2025•39 min
At ASUG Tech Connect 2024, for the first time, I hosted a joint podcast collaboration with the ASUG Talks team - to be issued on both of our platforms. Joining me in for a live podcast taping were familiar suspects: ASUG CEO Geoff Scott and analyst Josh Greenbaum. But this time around, we had a live audience - and pulled them into the conversation. The audience had a choice of an Enterprise Architect or AI focus. They chose Enterprise Architects - and, I think, for good reason. Effective AI is p...
Feb 09, 2025•45 min
Acumatica has been a influential vendor in the cloud ERP midmarket - but does AI change the equation? Were there surprises on the ground in Vegas? Time to make sense of an important Acumatica Summit, but with a plot twist: Jon Reed is home in his bat cave, slugging down Vitamin C, while Brian Sommer grabbed an outdoor chair prior to his takeoff from Vegas. Jon gets into why Acumatica matters and asks Brian: what stood out this year? Was the AI narrative convincing? What did Brian hear that we di...
Jan 29, 2025•35 min
I was unable to get Josh Greenbaum and Brian Dennett together for an on-the-ground podcast at ASUG Tech Connect in November, but the show provoked important talks on RISE, clean core, and why SAP projects need enterprise architects. Those topics aren't going away, so we got together virtually to make sense of what we learned - and what's next. With looming ERP deadlines on the one hand, and modernization/AI on the other, it's a crucial year for SAP. The role of the S/4HANA public cloud edition i...
Jan 19, 2025•58 min
AUDIO ECHO NOTE: the echo is addressed after the first three minutes. How effective are we at visually engaging enterprise content? I'd say - not very. But Heather Willems of Two Line Studios is doing something about that. Can we revive stale events with visual storytelling? How does AI hurt and/or help our cause here? As always, you can expect a jugular and interactive convo - and Heather will share illustrations from some of her favorite past events, including Constellation's Connected Enterpr...
Jan 19, 2025•59 min
In the final section of my informal audiobook reading of Reaching the B2B Informed Buyer, we wrap up the strategies in the book - and the pitfalls to avoid. I also revisit the impact of AI on content generation and strategy; where it fits, where it doesn't. Where do we go from here? A combination of outstanding/expert content, savvy use of AI and personalization tools, but always in a context of making customers' lives better and earning trust piece by piece. Where trust is earned, opt-in data f...
Jan 16, 2025•22 min
In part five of my informal audiobook reading of Reaching the B2B Informed Buyer, we get into my favorite content strategy debates, including: AI for context, content experiences and entertainment value, and AI versus opt-in communities. The goal, however, isn't just to flesh out the debate but to advance the conversation, so we can get the most out of the right content and better serve our audiences. Hopefully as we do that, buyer trust and momentum is achieved.
Jan 14, 2025•18 min
In this shorter section of my informal, self-recorded reading of Reaching the B2B Informed Buyer, I take a break from the content strategy methods and debates to ask - who has put this into practice? I use a cross-section of examples, from diginomica and beyond - some more visionary, some more provocative, some more practical. I kept this section short to keep the examples easily consumed, before we move into the concluding chapters and AI content debates.
Jan 12, 2025•11 min
In part three of my informal, self-recorded reading of Reaching the B2B Informed Buyer, I get into the importance of earning topic authority: earn attention with industry expertise. This is where B2B marketers often stumble. Marketing is still about attention. Digital marketing didn't change that. And the new era of what vendors call ‘AI-powered content experiences’ doesn’t change that either. So what do we do about it - and how can we serve buyers better, and earn their trust? Note: the full db...
Jan 09, 2025•36 min
Time for part two of my informal-but-hopefully-entertaining reading of reaching the informed B2B buyer. In this edition, I get into an important debate I've had with Gartner's Hank Barnes: just how informed is today's B2B buyer? And: why is reaching B2B buyers so different now? Then we move on to chapter 3, where we examine the challenge of content marketing ROI - while today's B2B buyer "ruins the content party." 'Brandware', email blasts and chasing social virality has minimal impact on today'...
Jan 07, 2025•18 min
To kick off this informal audio book reading of his Reaching the B2B Informed Buyer d·book, Jon Reed gets right into the executive summary: why the sales funnel is broken, why marketers get B2B buyers wrong - and why the right content strategy still has a huge impact, even in the so-called age of AI. Note: you can get the full d·book on diginomica in the d·book section. It's also available now on Kindle and most ebook platforms, and a printed version and full audiobook version is coming soon. Fo...
Jan 04, 2025•16 min
I recently crashed the CRM Convos AI agents video show. Some of you may have seen me on there before - I have come on periodically in their AI debate series. So this time, they they had an interesting AI expert in the enterprise space, Andreas Welsch, to talk about the future of AI agents. At around the 27 minute mark, I crashed the podcast and start pressing some questions, and blowing a gasket of two. Here's the full conversation. Via the CRM Konvos team, following is the official text preview...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min
CIOs are in the pressure cooker. But advice is often cookie cutter. No cookie cutters with my next guest, Tim Crawford. We'll count down top CIO mistakes and Tim's top/overlooked CIO moves for being business-relevant, AI-savvy etc. I've wanted to get Tim on the show for a while, this is going to be a dandy - bring your sharpest and snarkest questions as usual.... Note: part two of this discussion, on next-gen analyst relations, has already been released as a separate podcast on my channel.
Dec 15, 2024•50 min
Is great/human-generated enterprise content still relevant? And how does today's content strategy and AI content hype stack up with my views on reaching B2B audiences? Can I tie this back into the hype (and potential) of AI for content distribution and hyper-personalization? To sort this out, it took a live/opinionated audience, and a special guest appearance by CRM analyst Thomas Wieberneit of CRM Konvos and more. Wieberneit is an excellent foil and sounding board, and I think we actually got s...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Yep, it's that time again. Join Brian and Jon for their rollicking review of the highs and lows of the enterprise event circuit - along with their article picks and pans. Speaking of article picks, special guest Hyoun Park will join the show to talk about his notable blog post on the state of IT FinOps. We'll also revisit Hyoun Park's landmark post on the "instant mediocrity" of generative AI and what's changed since then. As always, bring your smartest and savviest commentary... Note: to check ...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min
In the end, shouldn't analyst relations service customers better? Shouldn't enterprise analysts advocate for customer concerns? After discussing CIO pitfalls/opportunities with Tim Crawford of AVOA, we pick up in this podcast with a spirited discussion of the future of analyst relations - with a vigorous chat of experts keeping us on track. This was not always an easy talk, getting into issues of independence and disclosure, but these are important topics in the analyst industry. Note 1: Crawfor...
Nov 24, 2024•37 min
