Appian CTO on Process Automation in an AI World

“Merchants can bet on Shopify and not worry about falling behind the cutting edge here,” explains the company’s vice president of product, Glen Coates, to Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana on the latest episode of Tech Disruptors. “We are extremely good at software, so merchants can be really good at what they’re trying to build into their business.” The two delve into a broad range of topics and assess the problems facing merchants, discussing how Shopify addresses such issues in a highly unified and integrated manner. Coates compares the needs of an entrepreneur with those of an enterprise, talking through several product areas, including point-of-sale, logistics, capital lending and generative AI.

US companies are experiencing about 1,800 attacks every week through attempted incursions that are more sophisticated than in years past. Check Point’s chairman and co-founder Gil Shwed discusses the outlook for cybersecurity in 2025 with Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Firewalls, hyperscaler cloud capex, CrowdStrike’s mid-year IT outage, US elections, data security for large language model deployments and potential consolidation are some of the topics that were discussed.

As AI moves toward agentic systems capable of performing tasks with minimal human intervention, guardrails setting boundaries and human verification of potentially unsafe output become crucial for enterprise applications, according to Salesforce executive vice president and chief scientist Silvio Savarese. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Savarese and Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana take an in-depth look at the differences between gen-AI assistants and the agents, which the company announced at its Dreamforce 2024 conference. Other topics include the application of small vs. large language models, enterprise AI vs. that for the general public and security.

Enterprise work-management tools are likely to show dramatic development with growing machine-learning capabilities, more capable foundational models and the potential rollout of AI agents. This could bring opportunities as well as challenges, particularly in a space that’s highly fragmented. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, ClickUp founder and CEO Zeb Evans joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss the shifting landscape of work-management solutions as AI capabilities and tools continue to grow. They examine the impact of the changes on competition, and the importance of scale. They also talk about ClickUp’s product journey, how its solutions differ from peers and potential revenue models.

Datastax’s CEO Chet Kapoor talks about his company’s positioning in the database market with Bloomberg Intelligence’s Sunil Rajgopal and Mandeep Singh. They discuss the company’s pivot to generative AI, LLM customization and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) as enterprise customers evaluate different databases for AI inferencing.

Helping developers identify issues with the computer code they’re writing, from bugs to security vulnerabilities, is Sonar’s mission. CEO Tariq Shaukat shares with Bloomberg Intelligence how 7 million developers and over 400,000 organizations are leveraging the company’s platform, which analyzes more than 30 programming languages to reduce the business risk from bad code. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Shaukat sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to dive into the details of Sonar’s scale in handling trillions of lines of coding, its addressable market size, disruptions from generative AI, the power of so-called clean code and much more.

“It's like an orchestra – each AI expert agent has unique expertise and could be an individual musician, Joule would be the conductor, and you can think of the human as the composer,” Walter Sun, senior vice president and global head of AI at SAP, tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Sun breaks down the three pillars of SAP’s AI strategy, from its AI copilot, Joule, to application-specific AI and developer-focused AI tools. Additionally, the two cover topics related to SAP’s data framework for customers, and the decisions behind which foundational models it provides to customers.

Companies across industries will continue to scrutinize information-technology spending, looking closely at the IT assets and compute environments and their utilization, particularly as AI investments are set to rise. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Flexera CEO Jim Ryan joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss IT spending and optimization trends amid the ever-growing on-premise and SaaS software stack, and the platforms that help streamline costs. They also discuss Flexera’s product journey, scale and how its solutions differ from the likes of IBM’s Apptio. For more insights, register for BI’s gen-AI Nov. 20 conference here. Find this and other Bloomberg Intelligence podcasts at BI PODCASTS .

“The problem today is that data is growing at a 27% compound growth rate and budgets are not. There’s fundamental tension between data growth and budget” explains Cribl CEO Clint Sharp in an effort to break down how customers are struggling to get the most from their data. In this Tech Disruptors episode, Sharp sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana, and together the two discuss how Cribl is tackling this issue by simultaneously reducing a client’s data volumes and costs. Sharp also touches on how generative AI is making its way into the picture and how this shapes the future for the company. Click here to register for our event.

Enterprise workflows and tools are likely to see a dramatic shift as AI adoption and prowess grows, and the intensifying race to roll out AI could have implications for enterprise productivity, collaboration and process automation. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Appianco-founder and CTO Michael Beckley joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss how the ground on solutions to design, automate, and optimize business processes is shifting, the role of low-code platforms and how AI is likely to alter the outlook. The two also talk about Appian’s product journey, key customer verticals and competition.