Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

John Siefert sits down with Christopher Jones, Vice President of Ecosystems and Partner Alliances at T-Mobile, to explore why enterprise connectivity is becoming foundational to the AI Era. Jones explains how T-Mobile for Business is moving beyond the traditional perception of a telecommunications provider to become an infrastructure layer supporting distributed workforces, AI agents, enterprise applications, and data at the edge.
AI Runs on Connectivity
The Big Themes:
Connectivity Underpins Enterprise AI: AI may dominate enterprise conversations, but Jones argues that connectivity remains the foundation that makes AI useful. Applications, agents, enterprise data, and mobile workforces all depend on networks capable of delivering reliable access wherever work happens. That makes connectivity increasingly important as AI pushes workloads and data beyond traditional office environments and toward the edge. T-Mobile for Business is positioning itself not simply as a telecommunications provider but as an underlying infrastructure layer supporting whatever technologies enterprises deploy today and tomorrow.
Co-Creation Replaces Technology Silos: The conversation repeatedly returns to co-creation. T-Mobile doesn't want partners to build specifically into its solutions, nor does it necessarily want to embed itself deeply inside an SI's technology. Instead, Jones describes a co-sell and co-creation model in which different providers contribute their respective expertise toward a common customer outcome. An SI may own the application or industry solution while T-Mobile provides the connectivity that allows that solution to operate reliably across locations and devices. That distinction matters as enterprise architectures become more complicated. Rather than expecting one vendor to provide every component, customers can benefit from ecosystems that combine networking, applications, cloud, AI, consulting, and domain expertise while keeping each participant focused on what it does particularly well.
Resilience Requires Multiple Paths: One example of T-Mobile's infrastructure strategy is SuperBroadband, which Jones describes as pairing its 5G network with Starlink in a managed connectivity solution. The objective is to provide two independent connectivity paths rather than leaving an organization dependent on one. T-Mobile's current materials describe SuperBroadband as integrating its 5G Advanced network with Starlink and supporting capabilities including failover and load balancing. This reinforces the broader message of the conversation: as organizations place more mission-critical workflows on cloud applications and AI systems, network resilience becomes inseparable from business resilience.
The Big Quote: “No one owns the whole solution. It's how do you bring together a variety of partners that have their own individual expertise [to] work together for the joint customer outcome.”
More from T-Mobile:
Learn more about T-Mobile for Business Advanced Network Solutions and T-Mobile SuperBroadband.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain how AWS is combining custom silicon, enterprise applications, and agentic AI to drive its resurgence.
Highlights
00:02 — I wanted to talk about an interesting development at AWS, which over the past several quarters has been on a very nice upswing in its business, powered in part by their development of what is now a very large and extremely fast-growing custom chips business.
00:37 — That comes down to a billion-dollar chip deal that AWS has just secured with Synopsys, a chip designer that AWS has been working with closely over the last several years, as AWS has built what is now a custom silicon chip business that has an annualized run rate of $25 billion.
01:09 — This new deal between AWS and Synopsys calls for the creation of new chips that they say are “application-optimized solutions.” So, the incredible advances in the power and capability of silicon now being tied directly into helping enterprise applications run more quickly, more securely, more insightfully, and to handle the incredible volumes of data and transactions in the AI economy.
02:28 — And I think this is something that, as I mentioned, has been a huge part of the resurgence of AWS. Last quarter, ended June 30th, AWS's growth rate jumped to 37 percent, by far the highest it's had in several years. We'll see some new numbers from AWS coming out at the end of this month or early November for Q3.
03:41 — So, this demand for more speed, more power, more insight, more security for all of these, I think, comes along at a time when business customers are starting to say, “Yeah, I'm going to use a lot of agentic AI, but I'm also going to continue to use the enterprise applications that are such an integral part of my business and how I work and where I work.”

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why Gartner expects many agentic AI projects to disappear as enterprises get more serious about measurable business value.
Highlights
00:14 — We're starting to see some interesting analysis coming out of organizations like Gartner. Gartner is saying that 40% of agentic AI projects die by 2027. There are a lot of projects that are going on within organizations that don't actually have good business value or good return on investment.
00:52 — And we already started to see a lot of pilots that were just failing over and over and over because people were trying to implement technology just for technology's sake. So, I think we're going to definitely see an improvement across organizations around the world.
01:33 — And so, what we want to see is a separation between organizations that are just basically doing what we refer to as agent washing, which is just taking and putting in an agent, whether that agent is actually doing anything of value or not within their organization or as a product. They're just following that trend.
02:02 — Agents or AI technology that's coming in to actually solve new problems, not just put a fancy UI on top of an existing API. So, those types of things, we should continue to see organizations getting better at this, but it will mean we will see a reduction in the number of players in this space over time.


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Bob Evans speaks with Chris Leone, Executive Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, about Fusion Claw and Oracle’s push toward increasingly autonomous enterprise applications. Leone explains how Fusion Claw combines AI reasoning with deterministic enterprise computation to tackle complex, long-running work involving optimization, simulation, reconciliation, and planning.
The Rise of Fusion Claw
The Big Themes:
From Assistance to Execution: Oracle’s vision for enterprise AI is moving beyond assistants that help employees complete individual tasks toward systems that can actually perform substantial portions of business work. Chris Leone describes Fusion Agentic Applications as being organized around outcomes rather than traditional application functions. Instead of navigating separate processes and modules, organizations can define an objective — such as paying employees accurately and on time — and allow agentic applications to continuously work toward it. Fusion Claw extends this model to harder, specialist-grade problems requiring reconciliation, optimization, simulation, or extensive computation.
Reasoning and Execution Separate: A central architectural idea behind Fusion Claw is separating probabilistic AI reasoning from deterministic enterprise computation. Leone argues that running millions of transactions and calculations through an LLM would be economically inefficient and would struggle to provide the precision enterprises require. Instead, AI interprets the objective, reasons about the problem, creates a plan, and assembles the necessary tools. Oracle says the result is an architecture capable of combining AI’s reasoning abilities with scalable, precise enterprise execution rather than expecting an LLM to perform every stage of the process.
CEOs Can Refocus on Outcomes: Leone argues that the outcomes CEOs care about have not fundamentally changed. Companies still want to close their books faster and accurately, pay employees correctly, improve margins, reduce supply chain costs, and optimize profitability. What may change is how organizations pursue those objectives. Historically, employees often exported information into spreadsheets or specialized applications, performed analysis externally, and then returned to transactional systems to implement their decisions. Fusion Claw is intended to bring more of that optimization work inside the enterprise application environment.
The Big Quote: "The more control you put into the system, the more autonomous you can let the system run. So, the more control and governance we can put into these systems, the more autonomous execution we can allow."
More from Chris Leone:
Follow Chris on LinkedIn or learn more about Fusion Claw and AI governance.

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In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I explore the shift from using AI for workforce reduction to using it to amplify human productivity.
Highlights
00:18 — There's starting to be a better understanding that there's not a lot of value necessarily in just using AI to be able to do automation. What we're seeing is it does do a great job at this, and it frees up your resources to be able to go do other things.
00:36 — What we're starting to see, though, is some analysis coming back that is allowing us to be able to understand what we actually think is a wise strategy for those resources that are being freed up, versus bad strategies in organizations that may be looking at doing layoffs of certain resources and things.
01:16 — Gartner is now saying that by 2029, it's expecting 30% of all AI-driven layoffs to be rehired, and not only rehired, rehired at a higher cost than they were before. And that's due to the fact that there's going to be this sort of renaissance that we expect to happen, which is where companies that believe that they were going to get a ton of value out of AI, which they are, and they're getting freed up to be able to free up resources.
03:02 — AI and AI partnership with humans is actually resulting in being able to make a lot more value in a shorter period of time, and that makes it easier for your competition to be able to be even more competitive if they simply reinvest those resources versus just letting them go and taking a short-term bump on their revenue.

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