Explaining AI Agents & looking at CRUD

The twenty-third episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). We're back to our usual format this time, so it’s three topics in (just a touch over) 30 minutes, and the show notes are, as usual, included just below the embedded video. Matt and Alan are in the chairs for this edition, this time discussing our brand new report on AI Agents, whether business applications are just a bunch of CRUD, and how analysts add value (and when they don't).

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: AI Agent Explainer

Having confidently introduced this episode as the first of series 3, when it's the beginning of series 4 (apologies for that), Matt introduces the first big report release of 2025; "AI Agents: What They Are, How They Work, and Where Organizations Might Best Use Them". The pair discuss why this report is important at this present time and how it is designed as a primer for people being asked in their organizations, "What's our approach to agents?" and provide a guide to their immediate construction and use. Matt goes on to explain that it's the specificity that makes agents different from assistants (and indeed, there's a blog post on this exact subject that, for some reason, he forgot to mention). Oh, and the report is free to download, so there's nothing to stop you from getting your copy right away.

Topic 2: …a load of CRUD?

Next up, Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) was on the B2G podcast (with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner) last month, talking about a range of things, including his belief that business applications are simply CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) databases with business logic attached and that the business logic will soon be moving to AI Agents. Matt and Alan discuss this, with Matt rather annoyed at the reductive description being employed and wondering why customers would want to shift logic from well-understood applications into a more expensive, less well-understood alternative.

Topic 3: Analyst Value

Finally, for this month, following up from last year's discussions about the dos and don'ts of analyst briefings and user conferences, Matt and Alan are now taking on their peers in the analyst industry to determine where we all add value to clients and where sometimes we don't. We're fans of the insights from talking to customers but less of the hype (and just plain lousy analysis).

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJGd10oTpGQ 

Show notes for Series 3, Episode 12.

Related Links for Series 4 Episode 1
Specificity is the key to understanding AI Agents; Matt's intro blog to the new AI Agent research.
AI Agents: What They Are, How They Work, and Where Organizations Might Best Use Them; here's where to grab the report from.
Satya Nadella Reveals ‘How AI Agents Will Disrupt SaaS Models; Outlook Business' write up of Satya Nadella's appearance on the B2G podcast (where he outed all business apps as CRUD).
Here's the full 90 minute YouTube video of the B2G podcast with Satya Nadella.
In case you missed it, here's the post "Analyst Briefings; Dos and Don’ts" that we published last year af