Cloud Dialogues

In the second instalment of our Agentic AI series, Georgia and Matt are joined by returning friend of the pod and AI product expert, Pete Sbarski, to put our AI-generated startup ideas under some very real scrutiny.

But first… the news:

⚖️ Legal & Regulatory Shakeups A US court ruled that training AI on legally purchased books = OK, pirated books? Not so much.

Germany's taking on DeepSeek, pressuring Apple and Google to block the app over privacy concerns.

⚡️ Infrastructure Watch

Amazon's going big in Australia, announcing a massive $13B investment in data centers and solar by 2029.

Cloudflare and Google Cloud had a rough week, with outages reminding us that even hyperscalers aren’t immune to single points of failure.

💡 Back to Business: Can AI Actually Build a Startup?

Last episode, Claude and Gemini pitched six startup ideas.

This week, we brought in Pete to roast them (constructively). Here’s what made the shortlist:

1. 📝 AI RFP Assistant
2. ✅ Compliance Monitor for SMEs
3. 🔍 B2B Data Quality Tool
4. ⚖️ AI Paralegal for Small Firms
5. 💰 Grant Guru for Nonprofits
6. ✍️ Content Copilot for Solo Creators

🧠 Key Takeaways from Pete

• “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — some use cases (like legal AI) come with huge liability baggage.
• Data hygiene does not necessarily mean fancy tools — a lot of orgs want AI, but what they really need is cleaner, more structured data.
• AI isn’t the bottleneck — people are — from resistance to change to unclear ownership, it’s often human systems holding us back.

✅ What We’re Testing Next

We’re moving ahead with two experiments:

The Content Copilot – using AI to repurpose and summarise our own podcast archive.

RFP / Grant Assistant – trialing real-world applications with a friend’s health tech startup.

We’ll be back soon with some early results — and hopefully a winner. 👀 📩

Want early access and exclusive insights from our experiments?

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly executive takeaways from the edge of AI, cloud and innovation here: cloud-dialogues.com

In this episode, Georgia and Matt serve up your weekly dose of AI and cloud news — plus the launch of something brand new (and a little wild):

*The Agentic Series* — our hands-on experiment to see if AI agents can design, build, and run a business… with minimal human meddling. 📰

Headlines This Week:

Amazon’s AI Workforce Shift: Andy Jassy’s latest shareholder letter teases a leaner, more AI-powered workforce. The hosts dig into what this could *really* mean (and how Amazon Fresh’s “AI stores” were actually powered by humans in a control center in India).

BBC vs. Perplexity: The BBC’s getting legal over AI scraping — accusing Perplexity of publishing full articles without permission. Is AI crossing the fair use line?

Big Tech Chessboard: Rumors swirl of Apple sniffing around Perplexity, while Elon’s XAI Grok cozies up to Microsoft *and* Oracle Cloud.

Game on. 🤖

Launching The Agentic Series What happens when you put Claude Opus, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and ChatGPT 4.5 in a virtual war room and ask them to create a business? We're finding out. 🧪

The Challenge: Create a digital-only, serverless product business — researched, designed, and architected by AI agents. Each LLM acts as a specialist:

Claude & Gemini: product strategist & market analysts

ChatGPT: evaluator and judge

They were tasked with: 

• Finding underserved problems
• Sizing the market 
• Proposing architecture + GTM strategy 
• Recommending pricing and monetization models

📊 The Outcome: Claude’s Top Picks:

1. AI-powered RFP response assistant

2. Continuous compliance monitoring for SMEs

3. Real-time B2B data enrichment

Gemini’s (eventual) Suggestions:

1. AI-powered paralegal for law firms

2. “Grant Guru” for nonprofits

3. Content co-pilot for solo creators

🎯 Winner (according to GPT-4.5): The AI content co-pilot for creators, thanks to high relatability, market size, and strong demo potential.

🔜 What’s Next? We’re moving into solution design and technical architecture in the next episode — with expert guests joining the build.

Expect practical use cases, ethical debates, cost guardrails, and a few surprises as we let the agents do their thing.

💡 Don’t want to miss what AI builds next?

👉 Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive insights on executive strategy, AI architecture, and emerging tech trends - subscribe here cloud-dialogues.com

🎙️ Cloud Dialogues #34: Plugging AI Into the Real World — Why MCP Matters

In this episode of Cloud Dialogues, Georgia and Matt go beyond the buzzwords and into the wiring of enterprise AI. From AI agents that write code to cloud strategies that make a lick of sense, we unpack the tools and protocols reshaping modern AI — starting with the week’s wild headlines.

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🔥 News Highlights:

• Databricks acquires Neon, strengthening the serverless Postgres story

• OpenAI drops Codex, a multitasking software agent that’s raising a few eyebrows

• Google launches Gemini 2.5 and VO3, stepping further into multimodal territory

• Microsoft open-sources GitHub Copilot, plus introduces a new SRE agent

• Oracle bets big on AI, snapping up $40B in Nvidia chips for U.S. data centers

We also call out the rise of “vibe coding” and the risks of AI-powered startups without adult supervision. Georgia thinks that credentials still matter....

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🧠 Deep Dive: What the Heck Is MCP?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an answer to a growing problem that we are all hearing about: LLMs are powerful, but kind of clueless. Without fresh data, structured tools, and the ability to reason in real-time, they hallucinate. A lot.

MCP fixes that — by letting AI agents safely plug into real systems (think APIs, dashboards, HR tools) with structure, permissions, and traceability.

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💼 Why Execs Should Care:

• ✅ Inject real-time data into AI workflows without retraining models

• ✅ Reduce hallucinations and increase trust, auditability & reliablity

• ✅ Enable secure, role-based access to internal systems (HR, finance, ops)

• ✅ Build agents that do more than chat — they act

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🛠️ Real-World Use Cases:

• Pulling support ticket history during a live customer call

• Executing a compliance check via a secure API

• Asking your AI assistant to summarize live KPIs across platforms

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🎧 We wrap up with a challenge: what would it really take to let an AI agent run an entire startup? (Spoiler: we’re not there yet — but we’re closer than you think - eyes on this space 👀)

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#CloudDialogues #MCP #GenAI #AgenticAI #Copilot #CloudStrategy #AIIntegration #Anthropic #Claude #APIs #ModelContextProtocol #TechLeadership #DigitalTransformation

🎙️ Cloud Dialogues: Vegas, AI, and What’s Next with Google

This week on Cloud Dialogues, Georgia and Matt are joined by Anupam Phoghat, fresh off the tarmac from Google Next 2025 in Las Vegas, to break down the biggest announcements, hottest trends, and a few surprises from the cloud world’s glitziest event.

But first… the news roundup was 🔥:

🚨 In the News:

• AWS’s Big Growth Energy: 19% year-over-year growth and strong focus on making AI cheaper and faster—thanks to Tranan 2 chips.
• Data Center Power Drain: By 2030, data centers could be drawing more power than Japan. Edge computing, you’re up.
• OpenAI Eyes Windsurf: Rumored $3B acquisition of a VS Code fork to boost its dev game—and catch up to Claude Code.
• Nvidia’s $5.5B Problem: U.S. export restrictions to China are biting hard.
• Kubernetes is Back (Again): KubeCon London showed signs of a Kubernetes renaissance—maybe AI on the edge is to thank.
• MCP Becomes the Standard: Google jumps on Anthropic’s Model Connection Protocol bandwagon. AI models are finally learning to play nice with data.

 

🎰 Straight from the Vegas Strip: Google Next 2025 Highlights

Anu gives us the inside scoop from the Strip, where 35,000+ attendees spread across 10 hotels saw Google go all-in on AI everything.

✨ Big Announcements:

• The AI Hyper Computer: Custom hardware to supercharge inference at scale
• GKE Upgrades: Now with inference gateway and full VM support
• Cloud Run & Cloud WAN: Big leaps in serverless and networking
• Vertex AI’s Model Garden: A smorgasbord of foundation models, including Claude and Llama
• Agent Development Kit: Tooling to build your own AI agents (think RAG meets agents IRL)
• Open-source + Interop Love: More cross-platform support, less vendor lock-in

We also dug into: ⚾️ MLB’s use of AI agents to manage network ops
🧠 Why your AI is only as smart as your training data
🚩 Twitter/X as a case study in what not to feed your model

Anu wrapped by sharing the mission behind Nebulla Action—his new venture building practical, industry-focused AI tools for healthcare, finance, and retail.

 

🎧 Ready to decode Google’s big bets and what they mean for your business?

Tune in now wherever you get your podcasts—or hit the link in our bio.

 

#CloudDialogues #GoogleNext2025 #AI #CloudComputing #VertexAI #DevOps #OpenSource #CloudStrategy #GKE #AIInfrastructure #Podcast

In this episode of Cloud Dialogues, Georgia and Matt are joined by Amit from OpenOps for a deep (and refreshingly honest) dive into the state of cloud automation today—and where it's heading next.

We kick things off with a look at the latest industry news:

• Huawei gears up to produce its own AI chips in response to ongoing tariff challenges

• Microsoft and Amazon hit pause on data center expansion due to power constraints

• And yes… humanoid robots just ran a half-marathon in China (because why not?)

Then we shift gears into automation. Amit brings a wealth of experience—from Microsoft to cybersecurity to autonomous vehicles—and shares sharp, real-world insights on what it actually takes to build a sustainable automation strategy in the cloud.

🔍 Topics We Cover:

• The journey from visibility → orchestration → automation

• Why “human-in-the-loop” automation is often the safest bet

• How risk appetite should drive your automation roadmap

• Why not automating can cost you more than you think—especially in cloud security and efficiency

• The growing role of AI in automation (and why it still needs a chaperone)

💡 Amit reminds us that while the dream of fully autonomous cloud ops is on the horizon, we’re not quite there yet—and human oversight remains as crucial as ever.

Whether you're early in your automation journey or deep in fine-tuning, there’s something in this episode for every cloud leader.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts—and check out OpenOps on GitHub for some powerful tools to get started.

Fine OpenOps on GitHub https://github.com/openops-cloud 

#CloudAutomation #CloudOps #AI #DevOps #CloudStrategy #CloudDialogues #OpenOps

In this lively crossover episode, Mark, Michael, Georgia, and Matt bring their unique podcasting perspectives together for a deep (and occasionally hilarious) dive into the world of cloud, AI, and developer experience. Here's what went down:

👋 Meet the Hosts
The episode kicks off with introductions:
- Georgia & Matt host a show aimed at execs exploring cloud and AI strategy, launched in 2023.
- Mark & Michael bring a laid-back, pub-style tech chat that started back in November.

Think of it as business meets banter.

💥 Breaking Prod: A Dev Confession
Matt shares a "whoops-that-could’ve-been-bad" moment—he accidentally wiped critical files from a pre-prod app server right before a major CRM migration. The silver lining? A stealthy recovery from backups saved the day, and no one was the wiser (until now).

☁️ Cloud & AI News Roundup
The crew unpacks the latest in cloud and AI, including:
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): An open standard for LLMs to interface with APIs—recently adopted by OpenAI.
- Big Money, Big Roles: A jaw-dropping $255–450K job posting at Anthropic focused on MCP.
- AI Art & IP Issues: The debate over AI-generated images and artist rights heats up.
- AI + Security = Headache: From vulnerabilities to weaponization, AI’s security implications are growing.
- Oracle Data Breaches: Recent incidents affecting Oracle Cloud and Oracle Health (formerly Cerner) spark a discussion on health data privacy.

🛠️ Deep Dive: Developer Experience (DevX)
This is where things get real. The team unpacks what’s working—and what’s painfully broken—when it comes to how developers work inside big organizations.

What is DevX, Anyway?
- It’s the day-to-day reality of building software: tools, processes, workflows.
- Google’s monorepo + DevX team gets a gold star, but most companies? Not quite there yet.

Common DevX Pain Points:
- Security rules that block the tools devs actually *want* to use.
- Glacial laptops and outdated hardware.
- Missing, buried, or just plain wrong documentation.
- Slow, bureaucratic approval chains.
- No proper API tooling in place (hello, Postman and Backstage!).

Why It Matters:
- Bad DevX = unhappy developers = high turnover.
- Wasted time for high-salary engineers isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive.
- Cloud migration without DevX in mind? Recipe for inefficiency and surprise costs.

Fixing DevX (Yes, It’s Possible):
- Build "paved paths"—secure, approved, and actually usable.
- Strike a balance between security and speed.
- Track where time is wasted (slow builds, anyone?).
- Treat developers like customers. Ask what they need. Then deliver it.

📚 Recommended Reads
The team wraps with book recs for anyone looking to level up:
- Platform Engineering (Michael)
- Unlearn by Barry O’Reilly (Matt)
- Working Backwards (Georgia)
- Amped Up by Frank Sluman 
- Plus: [DX.com/research/overview](https://DX.com/research/overview) for even more DevX insights

Bottom Line: Whether you’re leading cloud adoption or building internal platforms, don’t overlook DevX. Great tools and experiences aren’t a nice-to-have—they’re your competitive edge.

We’re back with another powerful conversation — this time with the incredible Julia Arnott-Neenee, Cofounder of Fibre Fale, tech leader and advocate for digital equity.

🚀 But first, we break down this week’s biggest Cloud & AI news:

🔹 Google’s eye-watering $32B acquisition of Wiz – what does it mean for cybersecurity?

🔹 Oracle’s $5B investment in UK Cloud – big moves in Europe!

🔹 Tencent’s new AI reasoning model & Apple’s clean energy fund in China (Georgia covers off on 'what are reasoning models?' 🌱

🔹 Microsoft’s Malaysia data center expansion

🔹 The growing data center power consumption problem ⚡

🔹 EU’s push to dominate the AI chip industry

Then, we dive into a must-listen conversation with Julia Arnott-Neenee, tackling:

🌍 The digital & AI divide—who’s being left behind?

💡 Empowering Pacific communities through tech

🔄 Why technology needs to shift power to those most impacted

👀 The big question: Who isn’t in the room when decisions are made?

Julia’s journey is inspiring—leaving a global career to serve her community and co-founding a Pacific social enterprise that’s already making waves (her co-founder just won Young New Zealander of the Year! 🏆). 🚀

Key Takeaways:

✅ AI & tech reflect existing biases—how do we fix this?

✅ Marginalized communities must be seen as creators, not just consumers

✅ Moving from tech for profit → to tech for people

✅ The need for community-led solutions in digital transformation

 

🔊 Listen now for a thought-provoking discussion on why digital inclusion matters more than ever.

👉 And if you want more insights like this straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter for the latest in Cloud, AI & tech leadership! cloud-dialogues.com

Find Julia's Fibre Fale here: https://www.fibrefale.com

#CloudTransformation #DigitalInclusion #AI #TechLeadership #PacificInnovation

In this latest episode of Cloud Dialogues, we dive into the evolving world of AI, data governance, and cloud transformation. Packed with insights for tech leaders, here's what you can expect:

 

AI Industry Insights

- CoreWeave's $12B OpenAI Contract: A reminder that infrastructure shortages could be on the horizon as AI scales.

- China's AI Ambitions: Baidu's Ernie models and Honor's $10B AI investment signal big moves in the East.

- Copyright Controversy: OpenAI wants easier access to copyrighted material—raising big questions for creators.

- Regulation Rundown: The EU’s early AI regulation contrasts with the US's more relaxed approach.

- Data Center Growth: Thailand's $3B investment and AWS’s new region create fresh opportunities for startups.

- Security Spotlight: Apple’s stand against UK encryption laws sparks debate.

- Productivity Buzz: JP Morgan claims AI coding tools improved productivity by 10-20%, and our hosts would lose to analyse this data. AI Innovations and Tools

- OpenAI’s New Agent Tools: Potentially big competition for Anthropic’s MCP.

- Robotics Advances: DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics pushes "embodied reasoning" in AI-driven robots.

- Sustainability Challenges: AI’s energy demands rise, with Amazon and Google pledging nuclear energy support.

 

Cloud Transformation for CIOs — The New Rules of Innovation with Steve Tzortzidis from V2 Digital

Steve brings a wealth of insights on building AI-ready data foundations:

- Data Readiness: To harness AI’s potential, data must be accessible, trusted, and well-governed.

- Federated Data Models: Balancing centralized governance with domain-driven autonomy to improve speed and accountability.

- "Start Small" Approach: Focus on specific use cases rather than boiling the ocean.

- DBT's Role: DBT’s testing, validation, and documentation features simplify data transformation.

- AI’s Future: Expect 2025 to focus heavily on AI agents, multimodal models, and real-world operationalization.

Key Takeaway for Tech Leaders Success with AI isn’t just about the tools—it’s about strong data foundations, smart governance, and embracing iterative change. If you’re steering your organization through data and AI transformation, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

🎯 Stay Ahead of the Curve: For weekly insights on AI, data, and digital transformation, subscribe to Cloud Dialogues weekly executive insights at cloud-dialogues.com