Are You a Cow or a Sloth? Ann Handley's Keynote on Balancing Speed and Substance in B2B Marketing

Ann Handley’s recent keynote was a brilliant blend of humor, storytelling, and an incredibly sharp take on the state of B2B marketing. Using the memorable metaphor of a "Cow vs. Sloth" from an old Mighty Mouse cartoon, she delivered an essential message: the future of B2B marketing depends on balancing the Cow's crush on speed with the Sloth's vital need for slow, intentional, valuable work.

Here are the key takeaways from the call to action for every marketer to invite "Sloth Mode" into their work.

1. The Performance Paradox: Why Speed Steals from Us

Marketing today is dominated by "Cow Energy" fast, efficient, and focused on volume. This energy, while necessary, keeps us locked in what Handley calls the Performance Paradox: What’s easiest to measure often matters least. And what truly matters is harder to see.

We chase what we can quickly chart (MQLs, impressions, clicks) and prioritize short cycles over long-term value. This hyper-focus on speed and volume ultimately leads to two major costs:

• Brand Trust Suffers: Shipping matters more than substance.

• The Message is Clear: There’s a lack of caring about whether the output is good at all.

The real super-villain isn't efficiency; it's when the Cow gets loose without the Sloth.

2. The Solution: The ASAP Matrix (As Slow As Possible)

The goal is not to slow everything down, but to be intentional about when we slow down to create compounding value. Handley introduced the ASAP Matrix a two-axis framework to guide this decision: Impact Over Time (lasting vs. fleeting) and Growth Potential (low vs. high).

The Matrix defines four quadrants for your marketing work:

• Autopilot (Low Stakes, Fleeting Impact): The everyday boxes to check. Get this stuff done fast.

• The Flash Zone (High Growth, Fleeting Impact): The "dopamine quadrant"—a spike in results (likes, attention, social buzz) that is gone a week later. This is the Sugar Rush of B2B Marketing; use sparingly.

• The Imperfectly Zone (Low Growth, Lasting Impact): Sustaining work that moves the needle over time, like a consistent, valued email newsletter. It offers an enduring platform.

• The ASAP Zone (High Growth, Lasting Impact): This is the Slow-ment—the moment that deserves your full attention. The stakes are incredibly high, and slowing down here is leadership, not hesitation. This is the box where compounding value is created.

3. Two Ways to Invite the Sloth Into Your Work

Handley offered a tactical and a philosophical way to embrace the Sloth's slow-motion slam:

Tactical: Make Meaning Measurable

To make the Sloth matter, we need to supplement performance metrics with Depth Metrics that capture long-term value. She suggested including these in your "depth dashboard":

• Brand Search Queries: Are people searching for you directly?

• Scroll Depth & Story Shares: Are they engaging deeply?

• The Open-to-Write-Back Rate: How many people open your email and are inspired to write back to you? (The "Holy Grail" for B2B marketers.)

• The Resubscribe Rate: How many people who leave a company resubscribe to you at their new job?

• Qualitative Assessment: How did your work make people feel?

Philosophical: The Power is in the Wind-Up

The real power of the Sloth's "slow-motion slam" isn't in the slam itself, but in the wind-up. He can’t pack a wallop unless he takes the time, patience, and care to wind up first.

The wind-up is the slow, often invisible work—the thinking, checking, listening, and caring—that happens before the launch. If you want to deliver enduring impact, you need to focus on shoring up the ability to do that quiet, slow work.

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Conclusion

The world will never stop selling us speed and efficiency; they are abundant. What is scarce now is the judgment to know what is truly extraordinary, the taste that shapes who we are becoming, and the joy in what we do. Handley’s parting question for all of us was: When does fast serve us, and when does it steal from us?

The decision to balance the Cow with the Sloth is bigger than just marketing programs; we carry both energies inside ourselves. The challenge is clear: use efficiency in service of our creativity, not the other way around, and recognize that the joy we take in our craft is the real superpower.

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The conference started off with a marching band in the honor of all B2B marketers!

Resources:

• Subscribe to Ann's newsletter: https://annhandley.com/newsletter/

• I am a MarketingProfs Pro Member—here is a link for you to upgrade: https://www.marketingprofs.com/upgrade

UJET Bought Spiral to Close the Loop Between Service and Intelligence

 Most contact centers sit on mountains of customer data they can't actually use. You've got millions of calls, chats, and emails, and somewhere in there are patterns that could prevent churn or fix product issues. But finding them means either paying someone to manually sample a tiny fraction or just waiting until enough customers complain.

UJET acquired Spiral on November 18, 2025 to fix that problem. The deal amount wasn't disclosed, but the strategy is clear: combine UJET's contact center platform with Spiral's conversation analysis to actually understand what customers are saying at scale.

Source: UJET press release and GeekWire coverage, November 18, 2025

What They Do

UJET runs cloud contact centers—the platform that routes calls, chats, and messages to support agents. They compete with Five9, Genesys, and others in the CCaaS market.

Spiral analyzes conversations. Founded in 2018 by Elena Zhizhimontova and Andrew DiLosa (both came from Amazon), they built software that scans customer interactions across every channel—voice, chat, email, surveys, social—and automatically spots patterns and issues. You can search through it using plain English questions.

Put simply: UJET handles customer interactions. Spiral figures out what those interactions mean.

Why Buy Spiral

Most contact center software gives you basic metrics—call volumes, wait times, satisfaction scores. That tells you if agents are busy, but not why customers are calling or what issues keep coming up.

Spiral scans millions of conversations and surfaces specific problems that wouldn't show up in normal reporting. UJET CEO Vasili Triant said companies lose $5 million to $30 million annually from churn they could've prevented if they'd caught issues earlier.

Now UJET can do both: run the contact center and understand what's actually going wrong. Spiral spots the problems, UJET's platform uses those insights to improve agent guidance and automation, which creates better data for Spiral to work with. The loop keeps getting tighter.

Who This Helps

Support leaders stuck with manual sampling. If you're only reviewing 2% of interactions to find quality issues, Spiral looks at everything. Remitly used it to scan two full years of support data instead of spot-checking.

Product teams trying to figure out what's broken. Customers tell support the real problems. Spiral pulls that feedback from every channel and lets you search it in regular English. "Where do customers get confused during signup?" gets answered with actual conversation data.

Companies not using UJET. Here's the smart part—Spiral stays a standalone product. If you run your contact center on Zendesk or Salesforce, you can still buy Spiral as an add-on analytics layer. UJET VP Matthew Clare confirmed they'll sell it over any contact center platform.

Anyone tired of missing obvious problems. Turo's COO Julie Weingardt said Spiral completely changed how they handle customer feedback. They used it to improve self-service, update their help docs, and train agents based on what customers actually struggle with.

What UJET Gets From This

Product completeness is the obvious play. UJET now offers both the contact center infrastructure and the intelligence layer. That's harder for competitors to match without acquisitions of their own.

A standalone revenue stream through Spiral by UJET. Keeping it as a separate offering that works with any contact center expands their addressable market beyond just UJET CCaaS customers.

Talent acquisition. Zhizhimontova becomes VP of Applied AI, and Spiral's team (less than 10 people) joins UJET. Former Amazon engineers who built conversational analytics are exactly the kind of team you want if you're serious about AI differentiation.

Data advantage. The more conversations Spiral analyzes, the better its AI gets at detecting patterns. The more insights it surfaces, the better UJET's automation becomes. That's a flywheel that gets stronger with usage, and it's harder for competitors to replicate without similar scale.

The Numbers Nobody's Talking About

Spiral raised about $7 million from investors including Trilogy Equity Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Techstars, Alumni Ventures Group, and the Alexa Fund. Less than 10 employees. Customers include Owlet, Whitepages, and Turo.

The acquisition price wasn't disclosed, but given the funding history and team size, this was probably a strategic tuck-in acquisition rather than a massive bet. UJET wanted the technology and team, and Spiral likely saw better distribution and resources as part of a larger contact center platform.

The customer service AI market was valued at over $13 billion in 2024. Spiral competed with much larger players like Qualtrics, Chattermill, and Medallia. Being acquired by a CCaaS provider gives them a clearer path to market and deeper platform integration than they could build as a standalone startup.

What This Means for Contact Center Software

There's a theme here: the gap between handling customer interactions and understanding what those interactions mean is expensive. Most companies operate their contact centers partially blind, reacting to problems after they've escalated rather than detecting them early.

The shift happening in CCaaS is from infrastructure (handling calls and chats) to intelligence (understanding why customers are calling). Automation matters, but only if you're automating the right things. You need conversational analytics to know what to optimize.

UJET's positioning this as closing the loop between communication, listening, and action. That's the right framing. A contact center that can't learn from its own data isn't much better than a phone bank with better routing.

If this works, expect other CCaaS vendors to either build or buy similar analytics capabilities. The alternative is becoming commoditized infrastructure while the intelligence layer gets owned by specialized AI companies.

The Quiet Signal

The most interesting part might be that Spiral operates as a standalone product. UJET isn't forcing customers onto their platform to get the analytics. They're willing to sell intelligence as an overlay to any contact center.

That's confidence. It means they believe the insights are valuable enough to pay for separately, and it gives them a wedge into accounts using competitor platforms. Once you're analyzing all customer conversations through Spiral, switching to UJET for the full integrated experience becomes an easier sell.

For contact center leaders, the question is shifting. It's not just "which platform handles interactions better?" It's "which platform helps us actually understand and fix customer issues before they become churn?"

UJET's making a bet that the answer is "the one with conversational intelligence built in."

The Cloud Just Got a Whole Lot More Rugged: Why GDIT and Google's New AI Partnership Actually Matters

The Problem with Being "Always On"

Let's be real for a second. We all rely on the internet for pretty much everything. Your phone, your smart fridge, your work laptop—they all need a solid connection. But what happens when you're in a place where "solid connection" is a joke? 

Think about a soldier in a remote desert, a disaster relief team in a blackout zone, or even a Coast Guard cutter far out at sea. Their work is the most critical, but their connectivity is the worst. That's the problem this new partnership between General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) and Google Public Sector is trying to solve. They're not just talking about putting AI in the cloud; they're talking about putting the cloud, and all that AI power, right where the action is.

What This Thing Actually Does

Forget the corporate buzzwords for a minute. What GDIT and Google are doing boils down to two seriously cool, and very different, things.

1. AI at the Edge (The "Cloud-in-a-Box")

This is the part that sounds like science fiction. They call it "Mission Edge AI." Essentially, they're taking Google's powerful cloud computing and AI tools and stuffing them into a portable, ruggedized box—a literal "cloud-in-a-box."

• The Feature: This box can run complex AI and data analysis even when it's completely disconnected from the internet. It's authorized for top-secret work (Impact Level 6, for those keeping score) and can be deployed anywhere, from a submarine to a forward operating base.
• The Benefit: Imagine a drone capturing thousands of hours of video. Instead of sending all that data back to a central HQ (which could take days or be impossible), the AI in the box processes it right there. It flags the one important thing the human needs to see, instantly. This is about speeding up decision-making when seconds count.

2. Making Government Services Suck Less

The second focus is much closer to home: modernizing citizen services. If you've ever spent an hour on hold with a government agency, you know the pain.

• The Feature: They're using Google's Contact Center AI Platform, combined with GDIT's expertise, to overhaul those clunky call centers. This includes all the fancy AI types—conversational, generative, and "agentic" (which basically means AI that can act on its own).
• The Benefit: The goal is to make it so you can get your question answered instantly, without talking to a person, or at least get routed to the right person faster. Honestly, this is just about making the government feel less like a maze and more like a modern service provider.

Is This a Competitor to Existing Solutions? (Spoiler: Yes, and No)

Let's be real: GDIT and Google aren't operating in a vacuum.

In the "Mission Edge AI" space, they are absolutely going head-to-head with the biggest players. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has its Outposts, and Microsoft has Azure Stack. These are all different flavors of the same idea: bringing the public cloud's power to a private, local environment. The key difference here is the ruggedization and the security clearance. Google Distributed Cloud's "cloud-in-a-box" is specifically designed for the most extreme, disconnected, and secure environments. Their successful demonstration with the U.S. Air Force is a big, verified fact that shows they're serious about this niche.

In the citizen services space, the competition is less about the cloud platform and more about the AI application. They're competing with every major contact center solution provider (think Cisco, Avaya, and others) and specialized AI firms like Salesforce and Cognigy, all of whom are pitching their own AI agents to the government. The advantage for GDIT and Google is the scale and integration. They can offer a massive, end-to-end solution that's already authorized and integrated into the federal ecosystem.

Who Needs This and Why

This partnership is a win for two main groups:

1. The Tactical Edge User (Soldiers, Intelligence Agents, First Responders): They need this because their lives and missions depend on fast, accurate information. When you're offline, you can't wait for a satellite link to analyze data. This solution gives them the power of a supercomputer in their backpack, which is a game-changer for situational awareness.
2. The Average Citizen: We need this because we deserve better government services. The example they gave—a large federal agency service desk modernization—is a verified fact. It resulted in a 40% estimated reduction in call volume. That means less time on hold for everyone. When the AI handles the simple stuff, the human agents can focus on the complex problems, leading to a better experience for all of us.

What's In It for the Company? (The Strategic Angle)

Honestly, this is a brilliant move for both GDIT and Google.

For Google Public Sector, this is about market share. They are the third-largest cloud provider, behind AWS and Azure. To catch up, they need to win big, high-profile government contracts. Partnering with GDIT, a company with decades of deep-rooted relationships and integration expertise across every major U.S. government agency, is a massive shortcut. It's a strategic opinion that GDIT acts as a trusted front-end, making it easier for Google's technology to get adopted in places where "Google" might still face skepticism.

For GDIT, this is about staying relevant and profitable. Their core business is integrating complex systems. By deepening their relationship with a cutting-edge technology provider like Google, they ensure their "Digital Accelerators" portfolio is built on the best, most future-proof foundation. It’s an opinion that this partnership allows them to move from being just a service provider to a co-investor and co-developer of next-generation solutions, securing their position at the top of the government IT food chain.

The Business Value and ROI (Our Best Guess)

The business value here is enormous, but we have to frame the numbers as estimates, not facts.

The most compelling piece of data is the $12 million in estimated savings from the single citizen service modernization project. If you extrapolate that across the dozens of major federal agencies GDIT serves, the potential savings are staggering.

Focus Area	Estimated Business Value	Conservative ROI Estimate
Mission Edge AI	Faster decision cycles, reduced operational risk, and increased mission success.	20-30% reduction in data transmission costs and time-to-insight.
Citizen Services	Reduced call center operational costs, improved citizen satisfaction, and higher agent efficiency.	$50-100 million in annual savings across major federal agencies, based on the initial $12M success.

The ultimate business value is in the stickiness of the technology. Once a government agency adopts a secure, authorized, and integrated platform like this, they are unlikely to switch. This partnership creates a long-term, high-value revenue stream for both companies.

What This Means for the Industry

This collaboration is a clear signal that the future of government IT is hybrid, rugged, and AI-first.

1. The Cloud War is Going Mobile: The battle for cloud dominance isn't just in massive data centers anymore; it's being fought at the tactical edge. Every major cloud provider will now double down on their ruggedized, disconnected solutions.
2. AI is the New Infrastructure: AI is no longer a separate application; it's being built into the foundation of the IT infrastructure itself. The government is moving past pilot programs and is now integrating AI into its core functions, from warfighting to welfare.
3. The Integrator is King: Companies like GDIT, who can take the best commercial tech (Google's AI) and make it work within the complex, secure, and often archaic government environment, are more valuable than ever. They are the essential bridge between Silicon Valley innovation and Washington D.C. reality.

This isn't just a press release; it's a blueprint for how the U.S. government will operate in the next decade. And honestly, it's about time.

Zoho Just Turned 50 Apps Into One Operating System (And Your SaaS Stack Might Be Nervous)

Most companies run on duct tape and prayers. You've got Salesforce for CRM, QuickBooks for accounting, BambooHR for people ops, Zendesk for support, Slack for chat, and maybe 20 other tools. Each one needs its own login, its own integration, its own admin. Your employees spend half their day just switching contexts.

Zoho's been quietly building the opposite approach for years. On November 18, 2025, they announced what might be their most significant release yet: Zoho One is now an actual operating system for business, where 50+ applications stop acting like separate tools and start behaving like a single, unified platform.

Source: Zoho analyst briefing, November 2025

What Actually Changed

Zoho One already had 50+ applications and 75,000 customers using an average of 22-23 apps each. The problem was, even though they were all "Zoho," they still felt like separate applications. You had to remember which app owned which data, navigate between them, deal with multiple portals for customers.

The new release revolves around three things: unified experience, foundational integrations, and cross-app intelligence.

The Experience Part

Instead of a list of 50+ apps, Zoho organized everything around how people actually work. There's a Personal Space for heads-down work with your tools. An Organization Space for company-wide collaboration. Dedicated spaces for Sales, Marketing, Finance, and other functions.

The key feature is something called "Boards", think dashboards that can pull data from any Zoho or third-party application. Your finance data, support tickets, CRM deals, communication stats, all in one view. You can create multiple boards, and there's no limit to how many you can add.

Most dashboards people know - Power BI in Teams, Tableau in Salesforce, Looker in Google Workspace - work by sucking data out of the source apps into a separate reporting engine. You wait for syncs, you lose the ability to click through and actually edit the underlying record, and third-party apps almost never play nicely without custom work.

Zoho Boards flip that script. They reach straight into the live app (whether it’s Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Asana via SSO, or even a custom app) and surface the actual records and action buttons right on the board. A deal from CRM, an invoice from Finance, a support ticket from Desk, and a Jira issue all sit side-by-side, live, editable, no data copy, no latency. It feels less like a dashboard and more like an operating-system desktop for business work.

Third-party apps (via single sign-on) appear right alongside native Zoho tools in the same navigation. The system stops caring which app owns what data. There's an "action panel" that surfaces all your approvals across the entire system—invoice approvals from accounting, deal approvals from CRM, document signatures, travel requests, all in one place.

The Integration Part

Zoho tackled some foundational problems that companies don't realize are expensive until they add them up.

Every system needs its own portal. Commerce needs a portal where customers manage orders. Finance needs one for payments. CRM needs one for account management. Support needs one for tickets. That's four sets of credentials your customers have to manage, four separate logins.

Zoho created a Single Unified Portal that consolidates all of them. One login for your customers across every system they interact with, whether it's Zoho apps or third-party tools you've integrated.

Then there's domain management. If you've ever set up SPF records, DKIM, DMARC for email authentication, you know it's a pain. Different apps need different records verified. Zoho unified domain verification, validate once, and all dependent applications get configured automatically. They even partnered with GoDaddy so non-technical users can just authorize the changes and Zoho handles the DNS records.

Outcome-based wizards handle cross-app processes. Onboarding an employee normally means touching ten systems—HR, email, CRM, project management, file access, device provisioning, department assignments. Same with offboarding. Zoho built wizards that handle all of it behind the scenes. You follow one workflow, and the system updates everything.

Picture the typical offboarding checklist in a 500-person company on a fragmented stack: 45–60 manual steps spread across Salesforce, Workday/BambooHR, Google Workspace/Okta, Zendesk, Slack, expense system, project tools… Someone forgets to reassign accounts or revoke a license and you have a data leak six months later.

The new Zoho wizard is literally one screen: select the employee, set the last day, optionally pick who gets their accounts/reports/tasks. Hit go. The platform handles the rest—deprovisions logins, forwards email, reassigns CRM deals and support tickets, updates project ownership, kills expense access, generates the offboarding report—across every connected Zoho app (and third-party ones you’ve linked). Customers who tested it pre-launch went from 2–6 hours of multi-person busywork (and inevitable mistakes) to under 10 minutes, every time.

The Intelligence Part

This is where having unified data actually matters. Zia, Zoho's AI system, now connects to the entire data layer across all 50 apps.

You can ask questions like "How much time did each employee spend with this account?" That requires pulling data from HR (who the employees are), CRM (the account relationship), Projects (time tracking), and Support (ticket hours). Normally that's a nightmare of exports and spreadsheets. With Zoho One, Zia just answers it.

Zia also knows all 50+ applications. If you ask "Does Zoho have a tool for Instagram campaigns?" it'll point you to Zoho Social and walk you through setup. It's trained on the entire platform, so it can guide users through capabilities they didn't know existed.

No separate connectors or data warehouses needed. The data is already unified.

This Isn't About Beating Salesforce or Microsoft

Zoho One doesn't compete with Salesforce or Microsoft 365 the way people think. Salesforce is primarily CRM with some extensions. Microsoft 365 is productivity and collaboration with business apps bolted on.

Zoho's going after the entire fragmented SaaS stack. The 30-50 tools that mid-size companies license because they need best-of-breed for each function. The bet is that "good enough and unified" beats "best-of-breed but disconnected."

It's a different philosophy. Instead of integrating the best tools, they're making their integrated tools better.

Who This Actually Helps

Mid-size companies tired of vendor management. If you're running 20+ SaaS subscriptions, each with its own renewal cycle, support contract, and integration requirements, consolidating to one vendor has real appeal. Even if individual Zoho apps aren't category leaders, the operational simplicity might be worth it.

Teams losing productivity to context switching. The unified interface and cross-app boards mean less time navigating between tools. The action panel for approvals alone could save hours weekly for managers.

Customers dealing with multiple portals. If your clients have to remember separate logins for your billing system, support system, and customer portal, the unified portal is a genuine improvement to their experience.

IT teams managing onboarding/offboarding. The outcome-based wizards replace manual processes across multiple systems. That's measurable time savings and reduced error rate.

Companies that started with one Zoho app. The typical path is discovering one app, then another, then deciding the suite makes sense. These customers now get all this unified capability within their existing subscription.

What Zoho Gets From This

The more deeply integrated you get across 50 apps, the harder it is to leave. That's just math. Switching one app is manageable. Switching your entire operational stack? That's a migration project that takes quarters.

The unified portal, domain management, and cross-app workflows create structural lock-in. Not in a malicious way—it's just that the value comes from integration, and integration means you're invested in the ecosystem.

Zoho also gets better AI training data. When your data sits across fragmented systems, each AI tool only sees its silo. When everything's unified, Zia can learn from relationships across HR, sales, finance, and support simultaneously. That's a competitive advantage that's hard to replicate.

For customers who started with one or two Zoho apps, the natural expansion path is now clearer. The more apps they add, the more value they get from unification. Classic land-and-expand, but built into the product architecture rather than just the sales motion.

The Quiet Consolidation Play

Here's what makes this release interesting: existing customers get everything. No new licenses for the unified portal. No extra cost for the AI features. No separate integration platform to buy. It's all included.

That's unusual. Most vendors would price these as add-ons or separate SKUs. Zoho's betting that making the unified experience standard will drive more customers to expand their usage across the suite.

What This Means for SaaS Sprawl

Companies have been licensing best-of-breed tools for each function for years. Sales on Salesforce, support on Zendesk, marketing on HubSpot, finance on NetSuite, HR on Workday. Each one is probably the category leader, but integrating them is expensive, and the user experience is fragmented.

Zoho's making a bet that integration is worth more than individual feature superiority for a lot of companies. Not all companies—enterprises with complex requirements might still need specialized tools. But for the mid-market? The value proposition is getting stronger.

If this approach works, expect more vendors to push unified suites rather than point solutions. The era of "we integrate with everything" might shift to "we include everything."

For companies evaluating their stack, the calculation is changing. It's not just "which CRM is best" anymore. It's "what's the total cost of ownership for our entire operational stack, including integration, training, vendor management, and context switching?"

Zoho One is positioning itself as the answer to that question.

A New Way to Code: Vibe Coding and Its Impact on App Development

Coding can be a headache. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, the process of writing code can be time-consuming and frustrating. But what if there was a way to make it easier? Enter vibe coding.

What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is a revolutionary approach to software development that leverages AI to turn natural language prompts into functional code. Instead of manually writing code, developers describe their app ideas in plain language, and AI does the heavy lifting. It's like having a coding assistant that understands your vision and brings it to life.

Competitive Landscape

Vibe coding isn't just a Google thing. Other tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are also investing in similar AI-assisted coding platforms. While Google's AI Studio with Gemini integration is a frontrunner, Microsoft's Copilot and Amazon's CodeWhisperer are close contenders. Each platform offers unique features, but the core idea remains the same: make coding more accessible and efficient.

Who Needs Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is a game-changer for anyone looking to build apps quickly and efficiently. It's perfect for:

• Startups with limited resources
• Product managers who want to prototype ideas faster
• Non-technical founders with big app ideas
• Developers looking to speed up their workflow
• Why It Matters for Companies

For tech companies, vibe coding offers a way to accelerate app development, reduce costs, and bring products to market faster. It allows teams to focus on creativity and innovation rather than getting bogged down in coding details. Plus, it opens up app development to a wider range of people, fostering a more diverse and inclusive tech community.

Business Value and ROI

While it's hard to pin down exact ROI figures, the benefits of vibe coding are clear. Faster development times mean quicker time-to-market, which can lead to increased revenue and market share. Reduced reliance on specialized coding skills can also lower hiring costs and make it easier to scale teams. And let's not forget the potential for increased innovation and creativity when developers aren't tied down by coding constraints.

What It Means for the Industry

Vibe coding represents a significant shift in how we think about app development. It's not just about automating coding tasks; it's about changing the way we express and refine our ideas. As AI continues to advance, we can expect even more intuitive and powerful coding assistants that will further democratize app development and drive innovation across the industry.

In conclusion, vibe coding is more than just a trend—it's a fundamental change in the way we build apps. Whether you're a developer, a startup founder, or just someone with a big app idea, vibe coding offers a new way to bring your vision to life. So why not give it a try and see where your vibes take you?

Source: Microsoft News

The Real AI Cloud Battle: Cloudflare Buys Its Way to the Finish Line

Stop Wrestling GPUs, Start Shipping Features

Honestly, building a great app today means dealing with AI, and dealing with AI means stepping into the deep, dark swamp of MLOps. We're talking about GPU hardware dependencies, CUDA driver hell, managing dozens of open-source model weights, and then trying to deploy all that complexity across the globe without latency spikes. The average developer doesn't have time for that. We just want an API endpoint that works, is cheap, and is fast. That gap—the one between "cool model" and "working feature"—is the biggest headache in modern development.

The Tech that Changed the Game (Now on the Edge)

That's where Replicate came in. The verified fact is that Replicate built a platform that solved the deployment problem, primarily by using their open-source tool, Cog , to package models into reproducible containers. They made it possible to run tens of thousands of open-source models (plus some proprietary ones like GPT-5) with a single API call, and they built a thriving developer community around sharing those models.

Now, Cloudflare has scooped them up, and the plan is simple: take Replicate’s massive catalog of over 50,000 models, the technology, and the community, and shove it directly into the Cloudflare Workers AI platform. This is a game-changer because it instantly gives Cloudflare the two things they were missing: a vast, community-driven model catalog, and the expertise to handle custom model deployment and, critically, "fine-tuning"  on their own network.

Where’s the Competition? Hint: It’s Not AWS.

Let’s be real, Cloudflare isn't trying to beat AWS Sagemaker or Google Vertex AI at the "training" game. That’s a multi-billion dollar fight for massive data centers. Cloudflare is targeting the inference layer, which is where the vast majority of application spend happens, and they’re doing it at the Edge. This acquisition is a direct shot at platforms like Hugging Face Inference Endpoints and the clunky, expensive ways hyperscalers force you to deploy custom models.

The barrier to adoption isn't technical; it's mindset. Companies are so locked into traditional cloud models (centralized ML infrastructure) that shifting even their inference to a distributed network is a psychological leap. But here’s the thing: **emerging unicorns don’t care about legacy infrastructure**. They care about cost, latency, and speed to market. Replicate already served this audience, and now Cloudflare gives them global scale and edge performance.

My analysis: The new market isn't just "AI," it's Edge Inference as a Service (EIaaS) for high-volume, low-latency applications. Companies won't change their entire ecosystem overnight, but they will absolutely start running their inference (the code that touches users) on Cloudflare's edge while keeping their huge data lakes and training models centralized. It’s the ultimate multi-cloud hook.

The Real Beneficiaries: The Speed Demons

So, who benefits? Anyone building a globally distributed, real-time generative application. Think dynamic UI generation, real-time content moderation, instant image/video creation, or complex AI agents. These services require near-zero latency. When a user in Tokyo requests an AI image, that model needs to run on a GPU node in Tokyo, not bouncing to a central data center in the US. The combination of Replicate's easy deployment via Cog and Cloudflare's global network of GPUs running Workers AI makes this instantly possible.

This is for the startups that need to move fast and the larger companies that are tired of overpaying for their hyperscaler model deployment. It’s about leveraging open source effectively without fighting the underlying hardware.

Why Cloudflare is Playing Chess, Not Checkers

Cloudflare’s mission has always been to consolidate infrastructure. By acquiring Replicate, they weren’t just buying a feature; they were buying an existing, vibrant community and the highly specialized "expertise"  in fine-tuning and custom model portability (Cog). Without this, Workers AI was limited to a curated set of models. With Replicate, they instantly mature their offering, filling critical product gaps like fine-tuning and BYO-model capabilities.

My opinion: This move is about accelerating time-to-market. Cloudflare essentially bought a five-year head start on the MLOps tooling required to handle the messy, diverse world of open-source AI. They are positioning themselves to capture the next wave of developer platforms—the ones built entirely around AI agents and workflows.

The Conservative Business Case for Cloudflare

The business value here is straightforward but enormous: "Platform Lock-in and Revenue Expansion." 

If you deploy your fine-tuned custom model on Cloudflare via the new Replicate-powered Workers AI, you’re almost certainly going to use their other services: R2 (storage), Vectorize (vector database), and the AI Gateway (for caching and observation). This increases the stickiness of the entire Workers platform exponentially.

Conservatively, this acquisition could easily allow Cloudflare to capture an additional 5–10% of the non-hyperscaler AI inference market within the next three years by offering a demonstrably superior speed-to-cost ratio. This isn't just about the revenue Replicate generates now; it’s about making the Cloudflare Developer Platform the default choice for every startup building on open-source AI, turning infrastructure customers into high-value AI customers.

The Future is Multi-Cloud, and the Edge Wins Inference

This is the validation we needed: AI inference is moving away from centralized data centers. The industry is settling into a new model:

• Training: Hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure) still own the massive, expensive, long-running training jobs.
• Inference: Cloudflare (with Replicate) is making a strong play to own the fast, cheap, globally distributed inference.

The net result is a win for developers. The "AI Cloud" is no longer a centralized, proprietary playground. It's a distributed, open ecosystem where you can run 50,000+ models instantly, anywhere in the world. Get ready for faster, smarter apps, because the infrastructure hurdle just got significantly lower.

💡 The AI Coding Debate Just Shifted: Why 'Vibe Coding' is Out, and Formal Specs are Back

The General Availability of Kiro marks a quiet but significant shift in the AI coding landscape. It’s not just another AI assistant; it’s the first major platform to pivot from the popular "vibe coding" model—where you endlessly prompt the AI until it works—to a structured, spec-driven development workflow.

The core Business Value here is a hard-fought battle against the number one quality challenge in AI-generated code: passing basic tests but failing on edge cases.

The Hidden Cost of 'Vibe Coding'

Most AI coding assistants excel at generating fast code snippets. The problem? Traditional Unit Testing often only checks the "happy path" and a few specific examples. An AI can easily "game" these tests, leading to code that compiles and passes, yet contains subtle, critical bugs when exposed to unexpected inputs. This is where the time and credit waste occurs: in endless, undocumented refinement cycles to catch the missing edge cases.

The Spec-Driven Difference: Property-Based Testing

Kiro's unique take—the one that drives real business value—is not the "spec" itself, but the advanced testing it enables: Property-Based Testing (PBT).

PBT is the antidote to the "passes basic tests, fails in production" loop. Instead of writing tests for specific examples (e.g., test_add(2, 3) == 5), you define the properties that the code must always obey (e.g., adding any two integers should always return an integer greater than or equal to both). The AI then automatically generates hundreds or even thousands of diverse, random inputs to try and break the code against those properties.

By forcing the AI to first create a structured spec (requirements.md, design.md, tasks.md), the system creates a durable "source of truth" that the generated code is measured against—not just a passing test suite. This upfront planning reduces rework, minimizes wasted computational credits from failed, undocumented runs (checkpointing helps here), and directly aligns the output with the intended business logic.

The Enterprise Value of Structure

Beyond quality, the move to General Availability shows an Enterprise push with clear cost and compliance control:

Cost Control: The new Team plans with centralized billing and overage management address a major concern for engineering leaders: controlling the unpredictable credit consumption of agentic AI.

Compliance & Consistency: 

Integrations like AWS IAM Identity Center and the use of Steering Files allow teams to enforce organizational security policies, architectural standards, and compliance rules across all AI-generated code, making the AI a managed asset rather than an unguided assistant.

The shift to spec-driven development, reinforced by Property-Based Testing, is the industry's response to the growing maturity crisis of AI-generated code. It’s a trade-off: structure and upfront planning for a significant reduction in late-stage quality debt.

🔗 Uber's Real ROI: Buying Data Certainty, Not Just Rides

Love how Uber integrates airline schedules, as a new feature; it's a massive database integration project designed for pure operational ROI. This isn't a 20% side-project; it's a six-figure investment in data certainty.

The move closes a long-standing gap: the fragmentation between the real-time operations database (Uber's system) and the external public utility data (airline schedules).

1. The Strategic Database Angle

Uber is fundamentally reducing risk and cost by federating two previously siloed data sets. By consuming a real-time feed of flight schedules, Uber minimizes reliance on human input, cuts down on the operational friction caused by early arrivals or delays, and eliminates driver frustration from unnecessary cancellations.

Business Value translation: Lowered operational cost and higher driver retention (fewer cancelled trips) are the non-obvious payoffs, far exceeding the value of simply preventing a few wrong airport drops.

2. The System Efficiency Payoff

When you book an Uber Reserve ride, the system doesn't just record the flight; it establishes a persistent, two-way data link. This means:

 * The ride time is dynamically adjusted based on the airline's schedule changes, eliminating manual re-booking friction.

 * Optimal driver placement is achieved because Uber’s system knows precisely when demand will spike or drop, reducing driver idling and improving fleet efficiency.

3. Pricing and Data Value

Your confusion over cost (reservation fee vs. surge protection) highlights the value of the integrated data. The reservation fee is a premium for certainty—a price guarantee made possible because the system has superior, integrated data. This data certainty allows Uber to offer a price lock that protects you from surge, and protects their operations from chaotic rescheduling.

This move signals that for hyper-efficient logistics companies, the most valuable infrastructure investment is no longer vehicles or depots—it's real-time, cross-platform data synchronization.

What’s the most critical piece of public data that, if integrated into your own operations database, would fundamentally change your risk model?

🏷️ Tags

Data Integration, Database Strategy, Operational Efficiency, Business Value, Logistics Tech, Uber, Data Federation, ROI, Supply Chain, RealTime Data

Conga's Making Moves: What the Leadership Shuffle Really Means

Let's be real—nobody wakes up excited about CPQ software. But here's the thing: if you're selling complex B2B products with configurations, pricing tiers, and contracts that need three legal reviews, you're basically drowning without it. And Conga just dropped some news that suggests they're gearing up for something big.

What Actually Happened

Conga announced two major executive hires on November 12, 2025: Bryan Kyle as CFO and Lisa Martin as CRO. Now, these aren't your typical "we found someone on LinkedIn" hires. Kyle's got 25+ years wrangling finances for tech companies, both private and public. Martin's been scaling revenue operations globally. The kind of résumés you bring in when you're about to do something ambitious.

And here's where it gets interesting—they're not hiding why. Conga's planning to acquire PROS Holdings' B2B business. This isn't some small tuck-in acquisition. PROS does pricing optimization and sales effectiveness software. Combine that with Conga's CPQ, contract management, and document automation? You've got end-to-end control of the entire revenue cycle.

The Competitive Reality

Honestly, Conga's been that great product most people haven't heard of unless they're already customers. They've got over 10,000 customers and 6.4 million users—those aren't small numbers. They're generating 46 million quotes and 7 million contracts annually. But in a world where Salesforce CPQ, Oracle, and SAP dominate mindshare, Conga's been the underdog.

Here's my take: they've been sitting on a goldmine. They cover the part of the revenue cycle where money actually changes hands—quotes, contracts, renewals. While everyone else obsesses over pipeline and lead gen, Conga's focused on "how do we actually close this deal and get paid?" That's valuable real estate.

With Thoma Bravo backing them (who bought Conga in 2021), they've got the financial muscle to make moves. Thoma Bravo doesn't make dumb bets. They buy software companies, streamline them, and scale them. The PROS acquisition? That's the playbook.

Who Benefits Here?

The obvious winners:

• Enterprise sales teams selling complex products (manufacturing, tech, professional services)
• Revenue operations leaders trying to connect their tech stack
• Finance teams who want to automate contract generation and approvals
• Companies with subscription models or usage-based pricing

The less obvious beneficiaries:

• Mid-market companies that couldn't afford enterprise CPQ solutions before
• Sales reps who spend hours building quotes manually
• Legal teams buried in contract redlines
• Anyone trying to figure out their actual win rates and deal velocity

If you've ever watched a sales rep copy-paste from three different systems to build a quote, you know the pain. Conga eliminates that. Add PROS' pricing intelligence on top? You're not just automating—you're optimizing.

What's Conga Getting Out of This?

The CEO, Dave Osborne, is making calculated moves here. New leadership team, pending acquisition, aggressive growth positioning—this reads like a company preparing for scale.

My analysis on their strategy:

• They want to own the "commercial excellence" category before someone else does
• The PROS acquisition gives them AI-powered pricing optimization they don't currently have
• They're positioning for either IPO or a larger exit (probably 3-5 years out)
• They need heavy hitters like Kyle and Martin to manage rapid growth and complex integration

The mention of "commercial excellence" isn't accidental. That's market positioning language. They're trying to move beyond "we do CPQ" to "we own your entire revenue engine."

The Business Value Question

Here's where we need to be careful—I'm giving you informed estimates, not guarantees.

Conservative ROI assumptions based on typical enterprise deployments:

• Sales cycle reduction: potentially 15-30% faster deals (fewer bottlenecks in approvals and pricing)
• Quote accuracy improvement: companies typically see error rates drop 40-60% (fewer manual pricing mistakes)
• Contract turnaround: could shave 5-10 days off legal review cycles
• Revenue leakage prevention: better visibility might capture 2-5% of revenue that typically falls through cracks

For a $100M revenue company, we're potentially talking $2-5M in captured revenue plus operational efficiency gains. But your mileage will vary dramatically based on deal complexity and current tech maturity.

The real value isn't in one feature—it's in connecting everything. When your CRM talks to your CPQ, which talks to your CLM, which feeds your billing system? That's when magic happens. Right now, most companies are running on duct tape and Zapier integrations.

What This Means for the Industry

The B2B software space is consolidating fast. Salesforce keeps acquiring. Oracle keeps bundling. Microsoft keeps expanding. The mid-market players like Conga have two options: scale up or get absorbed.

Conga's choosing to scale. The PROS acquisition signals they're building a true platform, not just a point solution. With AI capabilities (which both companies have been investing in), they're positioning for the next wave of sales automation.

Where I think this goes:

• More pressure on legacy CPQ vendors to innovate or discount
• Increased M&A activity in the revenue ops space
• Greater expectations that systems should "just work together"
• Shift from selling software features to selling business outcomes

The appointment of a CFO with M&A experience and a CRO focused on customer success tells you Conga's playing the long game. They're not just trying to win next quarter—they're trying to reshape how B2B companies think about their revenue infrastructure.

And you know what? The new CMO they've got is exactly who they need. Brand awareness has been Conga's Achilles heel. With the right marketing push and a genuinely compelling product story, they could break through to mainstream recognition.

Bottom Line

Conga's making aggressive moves at exactly the right moment. The market's ready for consolidation in the revenue ops space. Companies are tired of managing fifteen disconnected tools. The PROS acquisition isn't just about adding features—it's about becoming the infrastructure layer for B2B revenue.

Will it work? That depends on execution. Integration is hard. Sales is hard. Building a category-defining company is really hard. But they've got the backing, the leadership, and increasingly, the product portfolio to pull it off.

For buyers, this is worth watching. For competitors, this should be concerning. For Conga customers, buckle up—your vendor is about to get a lot more ambitious.

Note: This analysis is based on publicly available information and industry patterns. ROI estimates are illustrative and will vary significantly by company, implementation, and use case.

Why Intellect Just Bought Zaptic (And What It Means for Manufacturing Quality)

 

If you've ever worked in manufacturing, you know the gap. Your quality management system sits in the office, full of procedures and compliance docs. Meanwhile, on the factory floor, workers are trying to figure out what to actually do with their hands. That disconnect? It's expensive.

Intellect just made a move to close that gap. They acquired Zaptic, a UK-based Connected Frontline Worker platform, and according to their announcement, they're now "the first QMS provider to offer fully integrated connected worker capability." Let's break down what that actually means.

What Just Happened

Intellect runs Quality Management Systems for regulated industries—think pharma, medical devices, food and beverage. They help companies stay compliant, manage documents, handle training, all that behind-the-scenes quality stuff.

Zaptic does something different. They build tools for people actually doing the work on factory floors. Digital work instructions, real-time guidance, data collection from the frontline. Companies like Berry and Asahi use them to connect workers with the information they need, when they need it.

Now those two things are one company. Your quality system and your frontline operations, talking to each other, finally.

Not Your Typical Acquisition

This isn't about eliminating a competitor. Intellect and Zaptic weren't really competing—they were solving adjacent problems. Intellect handled quality planning and compliance. Zaptic handled execution and frontline operations.

What Intellect's doing here is buying the missing piece. They can now offer something nobody else in the QMS space has: a complete loop from quality planning through frontline execution and back. That's the pitch, anyway.

Who Actually Needs This

Manufacturing ops managers drowning in disconnected systems. Right now you've got your QMS over here, your work instruction platform over there, maybe some paper checklists still floating around. Consolidating that stack into one integrated system? That's worth paying attention to.

Regulated industries where traceability matters. Food and beverage, consumer goods, pharma—anywhere you need to prove what happened on the floor lines up with what your quality system says should happen. The integration means better audit trails without manual reconciliation.

Companies expanding in Europe. Zaptic brings UK operations and European customers. If you're a manufacturer operating across regions, having a vendor with presence on both sides of the Atlantic matters for support and compliance with local regulations.

Frontline workers who are tired of toggling between systems. Better tools, connected to actual quality data, make their jobs easier. Less hunting for information, fewer mistakes.

What Intellect Gets Out of This

Let's be real about the business logic here.

Geographic expansion happens overnight. Intellect gets UK headquarters and European market presence instantly. That's a lot faster than building it organically.

Product completeness is the big one. Constellation Research (quoted in the press release) talks about how most SaaS platforms fail at frontline productivity because they lack operational context. By combining Intellect's quality data with Zaptic's frontline tools, they're addressing that gap. Whether it works as well as they claim, we'll see, but the logic makes sense.

Cross-selling opportunities are obvious. Sell QMS to Zaptic's manufacturing customers. Sell connected worker tools to Intellect's compliance-focused clients. The overlap in target industries (food & beverage, consumer goods) makes this straightforward.

Building toward exit? Strattam Capital backed Intellect in 2022. Acquisitions like this often signal the growth phase before a larger exit event—either another PE round, strategic sale, or IPO down the line. Consolidating the market, building a more complete platform, positioning for scale.

The Money Side

Intellect didn't disclose the acquisition price, but we know Zaptic was doing around $8.1M in revenue with 64 employees in 2023. Profitable, established, with solid customers. Not a distressed asset, not a talent grab—this was about capabilities and market position.

For customers, the value proposition comes down to consolidation. If you're currently paying for separate QMS and frontline worker platforms, combining them could cut costs. More importantly, the integration should reduce the manual work of connecting those systems—entering data twice, reconciling records, all that expensive overhead.

The real ROI is probably in risk reduction. When your quality system and your floor operations are actually connected, you catch problems faster. Fewer compliance incidents, fewer recalls, better audit outcomes. For regulated industries, that adds up fast.

What This Means for the Industry

Manufacturing software has been fragmenting for years. You've got specialists for everything—QMS, MES, frontline worker tools, analytics platforms, maintenance systems. Each one supposedly "best in class" but none of them talk to each other properly.

Intellect's making a bet that what customers actually want is integration, not more point solutions. They're trying to own a bigger chunk of the manufacturing quality stack by connecting compliance with execution.

If this works, expect more consolidation. Other QMS vendors will need to either build or buy similar capabilities. Frontline worker platforms might look for quality management acquisitions. The lines between these categories are probably going to blur.

For manufacturing companies, this could be good news. Fewer vendors to manage, better data flow, less integration headache. But it also means more vendor lock-in and potentially less flexibility to swap out individual pieces of your stack.

Bottom Line

Intellect isn't trying to compete with anyone new here. They're building a more complete product by filling a gap they couldn't address alone. For companies struggling with the disconnect between quality planning and floor execution, this could genuinely help.

Whether it delivers on the promise of being the "first fully integrated" solution, we'll find out as customers actually use it. But the strategy makes sense, the acquisition looks solid, and the problem they're addressing is real.