For years, the “wall” between storage and networking administrators has been a fixture of the enterprise data center. I spent the early part of my career as a network engineer and the arena of storage was a bit of a black box, and for most companies, that’s still the case. This is because these networks operated differently.
As an industry, healthcare tends to be slow-moving and significantly behind others. There are many reasons for this, including budgets, availability of technology and the fact that any errors in healthcare can result in lost lives. Healthcare transformation has been a big part of past Nvidia GTC conferences, and it was again this year.
The initial phase of the artificial intelligence gold rush was defined by “The Build.” Hyperscalers and model builders raced to secure every available Nvidia Corp. H100 GPU, constructing massive, centralized cathedrals of compute. But as the industry descends from the peak of inflated expectations toward real-world utility, the conversation is shifting. AI is moving from the lab to the factory floor, the retail aisle and the telco edge.
Cisco Systems Inc. held its second annual AI Summit this week, with a star-studded lineup of artificial intelligence celebrities. Unlike most vendor events, the Cisco AI Summit was designed to be a “meeting of the minds,” bringing together the “builders of the AI economy” to help the industry move past the hype and address the practical realities of a world being reshaped by AI.
As one would expect, artificial intelligence was a big theme at last week’s National Retail Federation’s annual event in New York City, as it was last year, but there was one subtle difference. The 2025 edition was focused more on AI education, whereas I felt this year’s NRF focused more on use cases. In fact, one of the speakers I saw said something to the effect that NRF is no longer a technology show but rather a business outcomes event.