1/ 🧵I was facilitating a 1:1 focus group today with a top tech firm and a very senior IT leader. The IT exec brought up the same issues with most sales pitches they get.
Vendors, listen up:
Here’s the brutal truth — and what will actually land your second meeting with a CIO 👇
2/ 1️⃣ Start with credibility — fast.
✅ Pop up the MQ or other analyst proof you're the real deal
✅ Tip the IT security checklist (ISO 27001, SOC 2, 2FA, where data lives)
✅ Make it obvious you’re enterprise-grade
✅ Cite 1-2 famous clients with impressive stories
Otherwise? CIOs start reading email in 1-2 mins.
3/ 2️⃣ Stop telling CIOs what they already know.
❌ “There’s a gap between strategy and execution”
❌ “Modern CIOs lead digital transformation”
❌ “AI will change your business”
They know. They live it. You’ve lost them before you even start.
1/ The intense industry saga around @DeepSeek_AI continues unabated today.
Here's a big-picture take on what we know right now, why it matters.
How has it seemingly shaken up the AI industry overnight as well as international competition in foundation models? 🧵
2/ DeepSeek: The biggest wake-up call in AI in years
- @Meta is supposedly in 'panic mode'
- Stocks of ASML, TSMC, @NVIDIA have made major drops due to market fear
- The apparent lesson: There is no moat for high-end AI
The top players must accelerate to stay ahead.
3/ What makes DeepSeek revolutionary?
DeepSeek’s R1 not another AI model. Secret sauce lies in clever + radical optimizations w/ innovative mathematics:
Reasoning over facts: DeepSeek treats reasoning as an input. Allows more dynamic, creative problem-solving.
Rewarding creativity: A unique reward system prioritizes innovative outcomes.
Efficient footprint: Highly distilled to run on low-end HW, breaking cost + access barriers.
1/ After months of painstaking research, I’m thrilled to share a groundbreaking new study on AI and the CEO.
@TheFuturumGroup + @Kearney surveyed 213 top CEOs across 19 industries, paired w/ in-depth interviews, to reveal a data-based picture on how CEOs are leading with AI.
2/ This isn’t yet another AI report.
It’s the first proven from CEO experience, actionable playbook for strategic AI implementation.
What’s working, where leaders struggle, and how they’re overcoming challenges.
3/ Some findings surprised me:
59% of CEOs directly lead their organization’s AI strategy.
AI is no longer a side project—it’s core to leadership itself.
Matt Garman, CEO of #AWS, is on stage talking about the early days of AWS and selling early #cloud to banks.
Now discussing building the best buildings blocks for the cloud in the industry.
#reInvent2024
1/x
Now #AWS’s Matt Garman summarizes the rich instance types they make available:
- Offers more compute instances than any other provider, with 850 different instance types across 126 different families
- Supports myriad use cases
- Large storage instances for databases and analytics workloads
- High memory instances for apps with in-memory requirements
- Fast networking instances for HPC and ML workloads
- AWS was the first and only cloud to offer Mac-based instances
- The #Nitro virtualization system allows AWS to differentiate:
- Delivers parallel performance
- Provides unparalleled security and isolation (key for #cybersecurity in cloud today)
- Innovate independently on instance types without redoing the entire virtualization stack
#reInvent2024
2/x
Exploring how its custom-silicon gives #AWS a competitive edge in the #cloud, Matt dives deep into #Graviton 4:
- The most powerful Graviton chip yet launched by AWS
- Graviton 4 delivers:
- 30% more compute power per core
- 3 times the number of vCPUs compared to previous Graviton versions
- Support for larger instance sizes to address scale-up workloads like databases
- Graviton 4 has a significant impact on customer workloads:
- Pinterest was able to reduce their compute footprint by 47% and carbon emissions by 62% by moving to Graviton
- 90% of the top 1000 EC2 customers have started using Graviton processors
- The growth and adoption of Graviton processors within AWS has been dramatic, with Graviton now accounting for as much compute as all of AWS did in 2019 (a $35 billion business at the time).