The thirty-ninth 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 additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). It's Matt and Alan again this month, talking about new vendor profiles, a brand-new report on the AEC industry, and 4 key areas for agentic automation to focus on.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: New Vendor Profiles

It's time for new vendor profiles, and we've just published 6. In this podcast, Matt and Alan talk about 3 of them (when Dan joins Matt for the June edition, they'll cover the other three). This time, they discuss agentic automation and Hyland's content platform (and how it fits into their new strategy under their new leadership). Then, Papyrus's Owlfie conversation AI approach to automation, and finally, novel AI-led retail process automation from European start-up Duvo (whose profile is available to read for free on its website). The pair also hints at a number of related reports, including a market sizing report soon to come.

Topic 2: AEC Report

On top of those vendor profiles, we've also just released a new report on the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry and the technological approaches to managing the plethora of complex documents across a wide range of projects undertaken by the industry's piece-parts and processes. There's a blog post that explains the scope of the report both upfront and throughout the discussion. Alan decides that everyone should get access to the report and open-sources it on the fly. Matt also notes that there's a whole wealth of further AEC material to come from Deep Analysis over the next few months.

Topic 3: Runtimes and Processes

Last month you'll remember that Matt and Alan discussed the latest release of the Work Intelligence research and since, Matt has been writing a little about what the near-future looks like the all those runtimes and how agentic platforms start to fit within that future. Here he talks about 2 recent posts: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason". The second of these contains "4 potential points of value" that agentic automaton platforms need to fit in order to add real value: problem-solving, flexibility, inheritance, and fraternity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAElcD9k2w

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 5
New vendor profiles in a brief blog post: "Six New Reports. No Hype. Just the Good Stuff."
....and here's the one on Duvo, which you can read on their website for free right now.
Here's the blog post Alan wrote about the AEC report, which you can now also download for free.
Matt's 2 blog posts on automation, runtimes, and an agentic future: "What if AI gets stuck at the task and never reaches the process?" and "Enterprises don’t need another automation runtime unless you give them an excellent reason".
Finally, here's the blog post that Matt mentions in passing on the "elastic zone of plausibility".

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The thirty-eighth 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 additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). It's Matt and Alan this month, celebrating the 3rd birthday of the pod (even if the episode numbers don't exactly add up), talking Salesforce, Work Intelligence and M&A.

In this month’s episode:

Topic 1: Salesforce Goes Headless

Starting off, Matt has remembered that it's the 3rd birthday of the pod, with the first episode being uploaded n the 19th April 2023 (just don't ask how come it's episode 38 when the pod has been running for 36 months). Alan has been in San Francisco at Salesforce TDX (the conference for Salesforce developers) and whilst he was there, he wrote a blog post about the announcements and Salesforce's technical progress, most notably the newly announced Headless 360. He explains the change in focus at the conference, from the core audience of Salesforce admins and Apex developers to increasingly opening up to developers that are not coming from a purely Salesforce background, in large part driven by Agentforce and Data 360. Matt points out that Headless 360 is an encapsulation of a technical approach, rather than a product and points to the 60+ MCP servers as the increase in potential complexity - as well as openness - for that extended developer community.

Topic 2: Work Intelligence 2026

Last month, we released the 4th edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, covering the period 2026-2031 (it's available right away for Deep Analysis subscribers as part of their cache of content, it's also available for non subscribers for one off purchase). If you're not familiar with Work Intelligence, there's a free primer from 2022 that's free to download for everyone. Here Matt summarises some of the content in the report, the projected value of the markets and the other details available in the report. Alan points out that even though the concept is now a few years old, it's now clear that the market is aligning with the basis of the world that we described in that initial report. Matt talks about some of the market growth data and then mentions that he's recently published an addendum to the report, which compares our market projections year-on-year. Finally Matt has some scary information about M&A data that's contained in certain other market reports - not written by Deep Analysis - that we've come across. Then there's some kind of related "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" chat.

Topic 3: M&A(&AI)

Whilst we're thinking about M&A, Matt has decided to mention one of the many pieces of content that Deep Analysis publishes, but sometimes forget to tell you all about. One such item is the quarterly M&A round up for the unstructured data automation market (i.e. the part of the market in which we specialise); who bought who and what market dynamics can be observed. This is available to all Deep Analysis subscribers, who get to see all the deals; large and small. In passing Alan mentions his blog post celebrating OpenText's new CEO's first day at his desk. Matt and Alan then go on to discuss how difficult to use the web as a reliable research tool (for rea

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