Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Salesforce is betting big on Slackbot to power the AI agentic enterprise.

Highlights

00:02 — We are seeing enormous changes take place among the leading enterprise applications vendors, with the rise of AI. Business customers are expecting a different way of working here in the emergence of the AI Economy. So at Salesforce, I believe Marc Benioff has decided to go all in on Slackbot to drive what Salesforce is calling the AI agentic enterprise.

00:29 — Now this is critical, because Salesforce is the largest enterprise applications vendor in the world. It also has an $800 million Agentforce business that it has built up, and it's taking both of those key components from agentic AI and also their enterprise apps business, and sort of putting those under the control of the orchestration of Slackbot, a brand new product.

01:15 — Benioff said that we are seeing in the business world the very beginnings of an AI agentic divide, where he said, on the one hand, there are customers that have understood the way they need to get into this, how to use agentic AI to do things better. And then, on the other hand, coming in there, saying, "Ah, you know, I'm not sure. I'm going to sit back and wait for this."

02:08 — He said Slackbot is already the fastest-growing feature ever in the history of Salesforce. He said it might be the fastest-growing feature in all of enterprise technology. And secondly — this is pretty wild — he said Slackbot and Slack are already disintermediating Salesforce.

04:36 — And he said, it’s our job not to just sit back and scratch our heads about this, but to help companies be able to address these changes, get out in front of them, get on top of them. And Salesforce believes that Slack and Slackbot, in particular, are going to be the ways that that happens.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Business Central is transforming ERP with strong financial returns and AI-driven capabilities.

Highlights

00:10 — A new Forrester report commissioned by Microsoft, entitled "The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central," has revealed some remarkable findings regarding the financial impact this standout cloud ERP is having on customers.

00:36 — And here's what it found: 209% ROI over three years, an estimated $464,000 net present value, and potential payback in just six months. The researchers aggregated the findings from interviewees and created a fictitious composite organization to develop this model.

00:58 — In their modeling, the researchers found that by year three, the composite company was experiencing a 30% reduction in monthly close time and up to 50% time savings for accounts payable, accounts receivable, and billing. It reduced audit preparation time by up to 30%.

01:19 — Consolidating outdated ERP products and systems led to more than a 10% reduction in total cost of ownership and over $170,000 in present value savings from withdrawn systems and decreased maintenance.

01:37 — Microsoft links these impressive results to how Business Central represents an AI-ready ERP foundation, enabling organizations to leverage Copilot, Power BI, and intelligent agents while emphasizing clean data, integrated systems, and standardized processes.

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In this AI Agent & Copilot Minute, Mason Siefert explores how Dynamics 365 is evolving into the agentic era — transforming financial reconciliation and accounts payable into continuous, intelligent processes, and previews what’s ahead at Summit North America 2026.

Key Takeaways

Agent Evolution: The journey from manual processes to copilots and now fully autonomous agents marks a fundamental shift in enterprise finance. While early tools accelerated workflows, today’s agents proactively execute tasks end-to-end, reducing human intervention and enabling finance professionals to focus on higher-value strategic work rather than repetitive operations.

Continuous Finance: Financial reconciliation has transformed from a stressful, multi-day effort into an always-on background process. Autonomous agents continuously match and verify records across systems, eliminating bottlenecks and dramatically improving efficiency, accuracy, and consistency across financial operations without requiring manual initiation.

Fraud Reduction: Accounts payable agents not only automate invoice matching but actively reduce fraud risk by cross-referencing invoices against purchase orders and learning from human corrections. With organizations facing high rates of fraud attempts, these adaptive systems provide a critical layer of intelligence and protection while minimizing costly manual errors.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack how Oracle is redefining data activation with agentic AI capabilities.

Highlights

00:03 — I recently talked about some big plans that Oracle has for fusing agentic AI into its applications and calling those Oracle agentic applications. Now it's extended its whole mantra from a couple of years ago that came from Chairman and Founder, Larry Ellison, where he said AI changes everything.

00:28 — Oracle's taken that very much to heart, and they're extending their agentic AI push deeply into their AI Database. There's a couple things I want to point out. In the larger sense, I think what's going on here is we're seeing the hunted turn into the hunter, right?

01:20 — I think in large part, not so much that the theory was wrong, although I do think it is wrong, but more because Oracle took the initiative, and instead, its pace of innovation and change and product development and customer-centric enhancements have been at a pace far beyond what any of these single-purpose competitors are doing.

02:12 — Now with AI, the point of Oracle's move here is to say we're going to bring AI to the data, instead of having to move all the data around here. And nobody's in a better position to be able to do that now than Oracle.

03:03 — [Oracle Executive Vice President Juan Loaiza] said, with the Oracle AI database, customers now, they don't just store data passively in a warehouse. Instead, he said, customers will be able to activate their data for AI and make decisions around data with stock-exchange-level robustness in every leading cloud.

04:00 — But the larger point here, too, is about, when Larry Ellison said publicly AI changes everything, that was a pretty clear indication that he was going to be leading this entire effort to go completely across the entire company, every facet of Oracle's massive portfolio is going to become AI-first.

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In this episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans sits down with Bonnie Tinder, Founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence, to unpack a whirlwind week in enterprise software. As AI reshapes the landscape at breakneck speed, the two explore major announcements from Oracle and Workday. Bonnie offers sharp analysis on the strategic differences between Workday’s user-centric AI assistant approach and Oracle’s autonomous, end-to-end agentic applications.

Episode 59: Enterprise AI Showdown

The Big Themes:

Oracle’s Autonomous AI Vision: Oracle is taking a more aggressive approach with its agentic AI applications, introducing 22 AI-driven tools that can execute entire business processes. Unlike assistive AI, Oracle’s agents can reason, decide, and act with minimal human intervention. This represents a shift toward AI as a “digital workforce,” capable of handling complex, cross-functional operations.

End-to-End Business Process Automation: One of Oracle’s biggest differentiators is its ability to automate complete workflows across multiple business functions. For example, designing a product while simultaneously evaluating supply chain risks and costs. This eliminates the traditional handoffs between departments and enables a holistic, real-time view of operations. By integrating data across systems and processes, Oracle’s AI can deliver more comprehensive insights and faster execution — potentially transforming how enterprises manage complex workflows.

ROI and Consumption-Based Models: AI is also changing pricing and operating models. Workday’s shift toward consumption-based pricing means customers pay based on usage rather than per-employee licensing. This can make adoption more flexible and cost-effective, but it also requires careful ROI analysis. Companies must consider not just technology costs, but also potential workforce changes, efficiency gains, and redeployment of employees. Understanding the financial impact of AI investments is critical for long-term success.

The Big Quote: “The high-risk areas you don't want to touch necessarily. You want to look at the high volume potentially first, to fully automate."

More from Bonnie Tinder:

Connect with Bonnie on LinkedIn.

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