Welcome to Runtime! Today: Nestle Group CDIO Chris Wright outlines how the food conglomerate's move to the cloud set it up for AI, Linux vendors race to deal with a critical vulnerability, and more.
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First up: Brewing a data strategy
Multinational corporations don't turn on a dime, but the speed at which AI is transforming digital operations these days leaves little room for error. After completing one of the largest ERP migrations to the cloud back in 2022, Nestle Group is now focused on modernizing its factories and streamlining its data pipelines to improve efficiency and set the stage for AI agents.
"It's moving so fast," Wright told The Stack in a recent interview. "It's not okay to just try and operate yesterday's model a bit faster," he said, referring to the challenges that AI security models like Anthropic's Mythos present to companies like Nestle, which operate complex physical supply chains alongside a sprawling digital estate.
Edward Targett
Its big move to Azure set the company up with the operational flexibility to deal with these new challenges, Wright suggested, giving the company's engineers the space to focus on business challenges rather than managing infrastructure. Now the challenge is integrating AI agents with existing applications, and "I would love the day that products emerge with the hyperscalers that manage this more effectively," he said.
But Wright has a clear view of what it takes to get massive companies like Nestle pointed in the same direction. "The people-change is every bit as important as the AI data technology change," he said. "Every bit as important, and it's harder."
The rest of The Stack
Bugging out: Cybersecurity models are finding vulnerabilities that have been hiding in plain sight for years in some of the most widely used software products in the world, and Anthropic's discovery of a new flaw in Linux set off alarm bells last week. However, finding a bug is one thing, while exploiting it is quite another, and debate over the severity of last week's notice continued into this week.
Edward Targett
Closing the Salesforce: Public sector organizations are in a tough place when it comes to upgrading their software systems; running outdated software makes them less efficient, but the price tag that comes along moving to a modern approach tends to irk budget watchdogs. HMRC defended its decision to spend $5.8 billion on a new CRM implementation from Salesforce because building its own platform would be too difficult and doing nothing to replace its aging system would leave it ill-prepared to serve the public.
Edward Targett
Crest the wave: Salesforce made its ninth acquisition of the year Monday with a deal for Cresta, a customer-service AI agent company focused on voice applications. After years of swearing off M&A deals, Marc Benioff is back to his old tricks.
Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy
Boom or bust?: Marvell's decision to spend $115 billion on Lumentum's optical networking technology could give it a competitive boost against Broadcom as data-center operators upgrade their systems to handle AI workloads, especially as demand shifts to AI inference. But the eye-popping size of the deal fueled concerns about the staying power of the AI boom.
Tom Krazit
Cracking open: Open models have been the talk of enterprise AI over the last several months as a vehicle for reducing AI spending, but how many people are actually using them in production? At martech Jasper, frontier models still power most of its internal and external-facing AI agents, but "I would say on a month-to-month basis we still see an increasing amount of usage of the open source models, and I expect that to only increase," CEO Timothy Young told The Stack.
Tim Keary
Stack ranking — Enterprise moves
Melissa Ribeiro and Brion O'Connor are the new chief people officer and chief marketing officer, respectively, at Netradyne.
Bahadir Onalan is the new vice president of engineering in Microsoft's CoreAI group, rejoining the company after nearly ten years in technology leadership roles at Amazon.
We're also reading:
They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS: A new project from former employees laid off by Okta and Salesforce to build clean-room implementations of some of their services is sure to turn a few heads.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
