We Love Ugly Data! The Deep Analysis Podcast

The forty-fourth episode of the podcast you know and love, "We Love Ugly Data!", is out, available in audio everywhere you get your podcasts and as a video on YouTube (embedded below). Alan's back with Matt this month to talk a few more of the latest drop of vendor profiles, making sense of the big announcements from Salesforce's Dreamforce conference and his choices in our new-ish segment; "Hugs or Bugs".In this month’s episode:Topic 1: New Research (pt3)Last month, we started discussing the latest set of vendor profiles made available to subscribers in July; Alan published a blog post with a brief summary of each at the time (which has since been updated). This time, Matt and Alan discuss the last two in that collection.First up is TCG, a process automation and orchestration platform that integrates documents, AI, human‑in‑the‑loop, and system‑to‑system interactions. They're specialists in very document-heavy use cases, like you'll find in the insurance industry, and can handle the complexity and document size that comes with processes like claims handling (including document dossier handling, where you're looking for the capability to handle collections of related documents as part of a single instance of a process). Alan points out that this marks TCG out from many of the other IDP vendors that are in the market; Matt mentions that its ability to use a range of different AI models and tools within a single document is helpful in managing their overall transactional costs of processing (remembering that not all models are equal in terms of their cost of operation). Finally, UAI Labs is an automation and AI services company that works with private equity firms to help them better understand the operations of the portfolio companies they invest in, then helps those companies improve their ways of working. The company offers a mix of consulting and technology as a contracted service, designed to help PE shops quickly understand how their newly acquired assets operate and how to improve those operations to increase value. As our latest M&A update notes, it's an interesting market right now for PE firms and specialist tools to help them overhaul and move on firms, which, you would imagine, would be of significant interest in that light. UAI Labs have also licensed the report and made it available free of charge via their website, so you can read all the details without being a Deep Analysis subscriber. Thanks for that.Topic 2: HeadlessforceLast month was Salesforce's Dreamforce conference; Alan was on the ground in San Francisco, Matt was in his home office in the UK, and the pair published a blog post wrapping up their early analysis. Here, they discuss AI Force, which Alan wrote about during his visit to the Salesforce developer conference TDX back in April, and why any analysis that says "they put the CRM into Claude" with Claudeforce is very dumb indeed. They look at how the headless thing needs a head - and Claude is an example of such a head - to operate and discuss some of the implications of that from a cost perspective. Matt also calls out a couple of good independent, Salesforce-specialists for their work (Salesforce Ben and Apex Hours) explaining some of the related concepts. There's also a discussion of how Agentforce has shifted to a "select your hero, adjust if you must" approach to get customers live as quickly as possible (quite a change from its launch 2 years ago).Topic 3: Hugs or Bugs?It's time for another round of our new podcast game, following on from our previous ones on banned words, analyst value, and briefing dos and don'ts, which Matt calls "Hugs or Bugs?". Here, Alan shares a trend he likes (Hugs!) and one he dislikes (Bugs!). The hug goes to the DM Awards, which Alan has judged for years (and is currently judging the 2026 version), because it offers great insight into real-world customer projects. The bug stems from confusing AI with LLMs; Alan is annoyed that people assume all AI is tied to the relatively recent arrival of LLMs, rather than the decades of AI technology that came before (for example, all those enterprise-grade ML projects). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjWuN0T1GHk Related Links for Series 5 Episode 10Alan's newly updated summary post of all the latest batch of vendor profilesDownload the UAI Labs report free of charge, courtesy of the company. The big joint Salesforce Dreamforce blog post from Matt and Alan.Apex Hours detailed discussion of how Claudeforce works in practice.Salesforce Ben's story about how Salesforce is changing how they're charging for Agent access.The DM Awards.Support the show

The forty-third episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out, available in audio everywhere you get your podcasts and in video on YouTube (embedded below). Dan's back with Matt this month to talk about a few more of the latest drop of vendor profiles, the great Instabase/SuperApp pivot, and his choices in our new segment, "Hugs or Bugs".In this month’s episode:Topic 1: New Research (pt2)Last month, we started discussing the latest set of vendor profiles made available to subscribers in July; Alan published a blog post with a brief summary of each at the time. This time, Matt and Dan discuss the next three in that collection. First up is Flexor, which has pivoted from data extraction to providing data with veracity for agentic use cases: the translation layer between documents and agents that fills in the parts LLMs struggle with. Next up is Haystac and its Ominsuite, which is a set of document processing pipeline tools that are largely OEM-ed to other software companies. They use small, industry-specific VLMs (Visual Language Models) that process image versions of documents and can be deployed on an air-gapped, discreet on-premises basis. Finally, we have SimplAI, an agentic automation AI platform designed to help enterprises and system integrators operationalize agentic AI. This enables the development and management of conversational AI agents, voice and vision functions, and IDP and full multi-step agentic process automation. Dan mentions that this fits into the discussion in his recent blog "Have we reached “peak” AI model wars?". SimplAI has kindly made this vendor profile available from their website for free and has also published a comprehensive blog post about their report here. Thanks to them for that.Topic 2: Super Pivot?In August, the heavily backed IDP vendor Instabase announced a significant pivot in its business, deciding it no longer wanted to be an IDP vendor and instead wanted to play in the nascent world of "multiplayer AI" and be called a Super App. Dan has followed the company for a while and wrote about this pivot here, and here reminds us that Instabase never really wanted to be thought of as an IDP vendor in the first place. He also walks us through the various rounds of investment the company received (~$300m; a record in this market) and how the most recent round brought in new investors who may have influenced this change of heart. Dan also reminds us that he's been warning - ever since our predictions in late 2024 - that for IDP vendors to grow to the size investors might wish, they need to grow beyond what IDP currently was ("crossing the border" in his terms). Matt and Dan go on to discuss what this super pivot might mean in terms of the newly named entity's future business and competitors.Topic 3: Hugs or Bugs?It's time for a new podcast game - following on from our previous ones on banned words, analyst value and briefing dos and don'ts - which Matt is calling "Hugs or Bugs?". Here, Dan offers a trend which he likes (Hugs!) and one that he dislikes (Bugs!). The hug goes to open-source and open-weight LLMs for how they're enabling innovation for software companies, large and, critically, small. The bug goes to companies that talk about their revenues in ARR terms (Annual Recurring Revenue, so multiplying a recent period to create a yearly figure) rather than TTM (Trailing Twelve Months, so real revenue for the preceding 12 months). Turns out both Matt and Dan have strong opinions on this one. STRONG opinions.Support the show

The forty-second 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). It's Matt and Alan again this month to talk about the first few of the latest drop of vendor profiles, technology market inertia, and Intelligent Guerrilla Warfare for information managers.In this month’s episode:Topic 1: New Research (pt1)First up, we recently published a big drop of new vendor profiles - 8, in fact - for subscribers. For both subscribers and non-subscribers, Alan published a blog post with a brief summary of each. Here, Matt and Alan discuss the first three in the collection; first up is Doc Labs, the first of 2 AEC specialists in this set. They tackle a real problem: document sprawl in the pre-construction phase, where multiple parties manage their share of the documentation in their own repositories, but there's still a need for overall oversight of all project documents. Next up, also in the pre-construction phase of AEC projects, is Togal.AI, take-off software for estimation that extracts relevant details from plan documents. Our returning champion amongst this set is Vertesia - which we last covered a couple of years ago - and since then has developed into an ECM-lite platform for AI-enabled marketing content. From its starting point in prompt engineering, Vertesia has built a platform that handles that, as well as model management, agentic development, and their historic skills in content management. If you'd like to read this profile in full, Vertesia has kindly made it available for free download from their website.Topic 2: Technology inertia?Matt, Dan and Alan have been planning exciting things for the rest of the year (look surprised when they happen), but as a result of that, they've been discussing what feels like an inertia in technology markets, created by the inability of customers to swallow the big agentic automation products that have been pushed in front of them. Matt's written a couple of blog posts ("Looking fast, but standing still" and "Real world problems remain real, until they’re not") and Alan's been thinking along similar lines from his last visit to Silicon Valley. Here, they discuss why we shouldn't assume automation is always coming to replace inefficient processes; sometimes it's replacing ones held together by real human ingenuity and quality of delivery.Topic 3: Intelligent Guerrilla WarfareAlan recently had a speaking slot at a conference in Philadelphia (that he mistook for a nuclear industry bash for some reason). He took the opportunity to provide some hints and tips for information management professionals on how to get themselves involved in AI projects ("infiltrate, don't confront", apparently). Matt also tries a steam train analogy for some reason, which doesn't really land. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnLiyZ5WUcY Related Links for Series 5 Episode 8Download the full Vertesia vendor profile for free from their website.Here's Alan's summary blog post of this entire set of new vendor profiles.Matt's blog posts: "Look fast but standing still" and "Real world problems..."Alan's Silicon Valley thoughts in "Determinism in Silicon Valley".Support the show

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 LoopSmall/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 debtMatt 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 7Microsoft 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.Support the show

The fortieth 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). This time, it's Matt and Dan for an IDP-focused episode, talking more about new vendor profiles, where all the cash is going in IDP, and how The Pope is contributing to AI governance (sort of).In this month’s episode:Topic 1: New Vendor ProfilesIt's time for another set of vendor profiles from the recently published 6. Last time, Matt and Alan talked about 3 of them; this time, Matt and Dan cover the other 3. First up is Box and Box Extract. Dan explains that the company had made some previous efforts around IDP with Box AI, but then acquired the Polish vendor Alphamoon in 2024, the results of which now appear as Box Extract. As a content management/content intelligence, it's one that Box itself is very excited about; CEO Aaron Levie described it as a "killer app," as Dan noted in a related LinkedIn post. Next up is Indico Data, a specialist in commercial IDP, and Dan discusses how that market focus came about, as well as some details on their technical background. Matt mentions that this market has a bunch of well-understood processes, and that if people are interested, there's a range of other related vendor profiles in the Deep Analysis database that are worth noting. Finally, Retaurus, who didn't come to IDP from a document-processing background but from the messaging EDI space. They've been a big player in messaging and especially fax, which remains an important document exchange format in some industries, for a long time, and have built an IDP platform to help augment their customers, especially in supply chain and logistics.Topic 2: Big money in IDP 🤑Dan wrote back in April about how money is pouring into IDP (pulling some data from his latest IDP Market Analysis), and here explains how the latest iteration of the technology that we're referring to as IDP came about in 2018/19 when significant money started to be invested in vendors like Hyperscience, Instabase, Indico Data, and others. In May this year, another well-backed IDP vendor, Rossum, was acquired by Coupa (they were already lined up as partners), which validated the value of IDP in this case, the spend management industry (Rossum had focused on selling into accounting teams). Reducto - who sounds like it should be fighting Spiderman, but as far as we know, doesn't - is an LLM-native IDP platform that's raised huge Series A and B rounds, that Dan estimates is valued post-money after the latest of these at $600m. Apparently growing revenue at a clip, selling into other AI peers. Matt points out that it's not uncommon to see a lot of peer selling between venture funding companies with investors in common.Topic 3: What's the Pope on about?At the end of May, the Pope got involved in the AI debate by publishing an encyclical titled "MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS; ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE," and, being Dan, he decided to discuss this matter with Claude. Matt points out that it was published ahead of Gartner's first MQ on AI Governance, suggesting that where The Pope leads, Gartner follows. In practical terms, Matt and Dan go on to discuss that the primary area of AI governance customers are asking about now is cost control policies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3xAcreasy0 Related Links for Series 5 Episode 6New vendor profiles in a brief blog post: "Six New Reports. No Hype. Just the Good Stuff."Dan's LinkedIn post on Box and Aaron Levie's excited commentary on Box Extract.Investors continue to pour money into IDP - Dan discusses the financial attraction of IDPIDP Leader Rossum is acquired by Coupa - Dan's announcement analysis blog post.How Reducto Became the Fastest-Growing IDP Startup I’ve Ever SeenThe Pope's encyclical on AI and Dan's chat with Claude on this subject.Support the show

The thirty-ninth 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). It's Matt and Alan again this month, talking about new vendor profiles, a brand-new report on the AEC industry, and 4 key areas for agentic automation to focus on.In this month’s episode:Topic 1: New Vendor ProfilesIt's time for new vendor profiles, and we've just published 6. In this podcast, Matt and Alan talk about 3 of them (when Dan joins Matt for the June edition, they'll cover the other three). This time, they discuss agentic automation and Hyland's content platform (and how it fits into their new strategy under their new leadership). Then, Papyrus's Owlfie conversation AI approach to automation, and finally, novel AI-led retail process automation from European start-up Duvo (whose profile is available to read for free on its website). The pair also hints at a number of related reports, including a market sizing report soon to come.Topic 2: AEC ReportOn top of those vendor profiles, we've also just released a new report on the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry and the technological approaches to managing the plethora of complex documents across a wide range of projects undertaken by the industry's piece-parts and processes. There's a blog post that explains the scope of the report both upfront and throughout the discussion. Alan decides that everyone should get access to the report and open-sources it on the fly. Matt also notes that there's a whole wealth of further AEC material to come from Deep Analysis over the next few months.Topic 3: Runtimes and ProcessesLast month you'll remember that Matt and Alan discussed the latest release of the Work Intelligence research and since, Matt has been writing a little about what the near-future looks like the all those runtimes and how agentic platforms start to fit within that future. Here he talks about 2 recent posts: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason". The second of these contains "4 potential points of value" that agentic automaton platforms need to fit in order to add real value: problem-solving, flexibility, inheritance, and fraternity.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAElcD9k2wRelated Links for Series 5 Episode 5New vendor profiles in a brief blog post: "Six New Reports. No Hype. Just the Good Stuff."....and here's the one on Duvo, which you can read on their website for free right now.Here's the blog post Alan wrote about the AEC report, which you can now also download for free.Matt's 2 blog posts on automation, runtimes, and an agentic future: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason".Finally, here's the blog post that Matt mentions in passing on the "elastic zone of plausibility".Support the show

The thirty-eighth 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). It's Matt and Alan this month, celebrating the 3rd birthday of the pod (even if the episode numbers don't exactly add up), talking Salesforce, Work Intelligence and M&A.In this month’s episode:Topic 1: Salesforce Goes HeadlessStarting off, Matt has remembered that it's the 3rd birthday of the pod, with the first episode being uploaded n the 19th April 2023 (just don't ask how come it's episode 38 when the pod has been running for 36 months). Alan has been in San Francisco at Salesforce TDX (the conference for Salesforce developers) and whilst he was there, he wrote a blog post about the announcements and Salesforce's technical progress, most notably the newly announced Headless 360. He explains the change in focus at the conference, from the core audience of Salesforce admins and Apex developers to increasingly opening up to developers that are not coming from a purely Salesforce background, in large part driven by Agentforce and Data 360. Matt points out that Headless 360 is an encapsulation of a technical approach, rather than a product and points to the 60+ MCP servers as the increase in potential complexity - as well as openness - for that extended developer community. Topic 2: Work Intelligence 2026Last month, we released the 4th edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, covering the period 2026-2031 (it's available right away for Deep Analysis subscribers as part of their cache of content, it's also available for non subscribers for one off purchase). If you're not familiar with Work Intelligence, there's a free primer from 2022 that's free to download for everyone. Here Matt summarises some of the content in the report, the projected value of the markets and the other details available in the report. Alan points out that even though the concept is now a few years old, it's now clear that the market is aligning with the basis of the world that we described in that initial report. Matt talks about some of the market growth data and then mentions that he's recently published an addendum to the report, which compares our market projections year-on-year. Finally Matt has some scary information about M&A data that's contained in certain other market reports - not written by Deep Analysis - that we've come across. Then there's some kind of related "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" chat.Topic 3: M&A(&AI)Whilst we're thinking about M&A, Matt has decided to mention one of the many pieces of content that Deep Analysis publishes, but sometimes forget to tell you all about. One such item is the quarterly M&A round up for the unstructured data automation market (i.e. the part of the market in which we specialise); who bought who and what market dynamics can be observed. This is available to all Deep Analysis subscribers, who get to see all the deals; large and small. In passing Alan mentions his blog post celebrating OpenText's new CEO's first day at his desk. Matt and Alan then go on to discuss how difficult to use the web as a reliable research tool (for reaSupport the show

The thirty-seventh episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts, and in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). Dan's back for an IDP special with Matt this month, focusing on the latest edition of the IDP Market Analysis and discussing this year's top trends.In this month’s episode:Topic 1: Agentic AI Will Transform IDPTo kick off, Dan explains the background to the IDP Market Analysis - now in its fourth edition - and that it provides an overview of how the market is performing and how it's looking towards the future, and, in the process, uncovers trends from both vendors and customers alike. Dan goes on to explain that the increase in the use of agents - now 66% of vendors saying that they are present in their product set - is helping those vendors move beyond being a single part of a pipeline process and to take on larger parts of those processes (and in the process, increase their potential for value generation). Dan also points out that 80% of vendors are now using foundation LLMs in their products; a state of affairs he predicted and is now pleased to be able to point to as a fact.Topic 2: IDP Is the Low-Hanging Fruit for ROIThe second trend from the report is that IDP is ROI gold. Dan points out that people forget the I in IDP really means AI (which has been around much longer than the transformers that underpin LLMs) and also reminds people that IDP's transactional nature makes it well-suited to finding investment models that generate returns. Using data from our 2025 IDP MMI survey, Dan discussed how reducing processing time is the biggest measurement that customers use for IDP project success (51%), with straight-through processing success -  where processes don't require human intervention, the long-time holy grail for IDP - at 47%. Indeed, Dan points out that the simplest way for anyone to find a quick ROI for AI in their organization is to look at IPD projects, especially as Matt points out, transactionally, these processes are often mature, well-understood, and have known cost bases. Finally, Dan points out that there's a potential reckoning coming as true LLM pricing becomes clear once any price discounting or token bundling from the foundation model providers ends. Topic 3: Mo’ Projects? Mo’ IDP!Cheating a little bit as Dan has 4 trends in his report, but we only ever have 3 topics on the pod, Matt's smooshed 2 of them together as "Mo' Projects? Mo' IDP!"; firstly, looking at the apparent boom in IDP projects, first identified within that 2025 MMI research, where that boom is largely made up of replacement projects for previous IDP platforms (legacy beware!). Matt points out that the double-digit growth projected for IDP through the analysis period should be contrasted with general IT inflation running at 5%; it's a strongly growing market segment. The second part of this topic is that there are more IDP vendors than ever; Dan's now managing a database of 500 individual vendors at the time of recording. The report itself has 24% more vendors than the 2024 edition and a number of interesting insights into revenue trends.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_eCUOJUujYRelated Links for Series 5 Episode 3The announcement blog post for the new IDP Market Analysis and the page where the report can be purchased (Deep Analysis customers receive this as part of their annual subscription).Our 2026 Predictions download (in case you missed it).The two-part (free) agents reports: AI Agents: What They Are, How They Work, and Where Organizations Might Best Use Them, and AI Agents Part 2: The Evolution from Single Systems to Complex Process OrchestrationPod Episode Series 4, Episode 9, where Matt and Dan discuss the MMI IDP survey in detail....and here's that MMI which you can download for free from AIIM.Support the show

30 mins of biting the hand that feeds us - demystifying and debunking the enterprise software market. The thirty-sixth (not the thirty-fifth, as Matt says) episode of the podcast you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts, and in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). Matt and Alan are in the chairs, and they catch up on some recent blog posts on how software isn't dead (again), how crazy promises on AI's future are not helping things, and celebrate that Deep Analysis is now in its 10th year of operation.In this month’s episode:Software is Dead. Again.It's been a year, but apparently software is deal again. And only 12 months since it was last dead. Here, Alan and Matt discuss the recent blog post "The 'Death of SaaS' Narrative is a Luxury the Enterprise Cannot Afford" that Alan posted in response to a lot of discussion about how current models for procuring software are over, and also, whilst we were there, software licensing is over too. The reality, of course, is somewhat different, and having discussed this, they touch on Matt's recent post "Beware the promises made by blank sheets of paper," where there are reminders that enterprises are complicated, and also, as a result, some companies are choosing to hold AI at the perimeter to keep things simple.Stupid AI PredictionsNoting that software vendors usually rely on industry analysts to make really dumb predictions, but this time it's Microsoft (again). In an interview with the FT, head of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman suggested that many while-collar roles will be entirely automated by AI in 12 to 18 months. Matt in particularly is very annoyed by this suggestion, describing it as "deeply dishonest", and then explaining why. He also points out that Suleyman's hiring was noted in a previous blog post of his from almost 2 years ago, in which he also suggested watching the "cash at hand" figure for software vendors. That seems to be now attracting a bit more attention. Finally, he also points out that Jad Tarifi of Integral AI has said some equally dumb things, such as that doctors (or lawyers) shouldn't be trained because AI will overtake their knowledge during training.Deep Analysis is (almost) 10Finally, Alan's written about how Deep Analysis is in its 10th year of operation, some of the areas where we've led thinking ahead of the game, and why we do things the way we do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=darqcAv-AgwRelated Links for Series 5 Episode 2Alan's blog post "The 'Death of SaaS' Narrative is a Luxury the Enterprise Cannot Afford".Matt's accompanying blog post: "Beware the promises made by blank sheets of paper."The FT interview with Mustafa Suleyman (subscription required)"Ex–Googler says degrees in law and medicine areSupport the show

The thirty-fifth 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). It's a new year and the beginning of series 5 (despite what Matt says in the intro to this episode, because he lost count) and with Matt and Alan in the chairs, they catch-up on some recent blog posts on the need for specificity, not to ignore paper, how there's no new cash in IT and how to make your Information Management skill invaluable in AI projects.In this month’s episode:Specificity & ElephantsAlan's kicked off the new year with a blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant", which is a result of him pondering about 2025 over the festive period. First is the need to continue to focus on the specifics of the outcomes from technology, rather that the technology horizontal markets that might provide them. Focus on the fixes, the bottlenecks in the real world. Second is that there remains a lot more paper in the world that technologists. Our own quantitative research data points not only to a lot of paper being used in processes but also to that amount of paper likely to increase (you can read about this in MMI reports that are available here and here). Matt reminds us that the sole superpower that analysts have is the ability to talk to people.Beyond the walled gardensMatt's published a pair of blog posts; at the tail end of last year "Beyond the walled gardens; can business applications break out to be the ultimate agentic orchestrators?" and just this month a follow-up "The lengthy hikes awaiting AI and automation in 2026". As he starts to update the data model for the 2026 edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, he's pondering how AI-native, business application vendors and existing automation vendors are looking to develop their businesses against an tiny inflation in IT budgets (and big renewal numbers being demanded by the core suppliers). The pair also discuss maybe why there's been a lot of big M&A for security software firms lately.How to not lose the AI opportunityFinally, Alan wrote an Information Management focused blog post in December "How to not lose the opportunity that AI offers Information Management". Here he discusses the ways in which IM needs to inveigle itself into AI projects to be the good stewards of data; "own the data, own the data sourcing, the cleansing pipeline, and the metadata framework for the vector store". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZKtMA72r5A Related Links for Series 5 Episode 1Alan's blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant" on the need for extreme specificity and that paper isn't going away.There a couple of MMI reports that talk about the amount of paper in contemporary processes;Market Momentum Index: Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Survey 2025Support the show