diginomica picks – my top stories on diginomica this week
Delivering on fulfilment speeds and AI experience – a Walmart status report from CEO John Furner – Stuart has the Walmart AI and automation update: “Interesting to hear from Walmart’s management on the ongoing importance of tech investment. Target’s quarterly report earlier in the week came and went without a similar level of focus on show.”
Chris revisits the economics of drone tech in a new series… check this from The flight plan for drone technology – cracking the chicken/egg challenge of funding and enabling innovation: “While some applications of drones and UAS are both promising and sensible – offshore and agricultural surveillance, civil maintenance, emergency response, policing, defence, media, entertainment, and deliveries to isolated communities – others are flimsy and absurd in a UK context: urban deliveries of non-essential items, for example.”
Why Marks and Spencer is spending £140m on digital and technology this year after putting the cyber-crisis of 2025 behind it – Stuart on a retailer that’s not quite as upbeat as Walmart. Bonus points for the use of ‘annus horribilis,’ as in: “It was the proverbial annus horribilis for the UK retail institution, but that’s now being put in the past.”
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here’s my top choices from our vendor coverage:
Data center revenue soars 92% as NVIDIA turns in another record-breaking quarter…and the share price falls – Stuart on NDVIDIA’s latest, and investor reaction – it’s complicated…
The re-invention of Workday – CEO Aneel Bhusri lays down the law on agentic AI – Workday’s strong earnings woke up a few who were, shall we say, confused about SaaS and AI, but it doesn’t end there. Stuart quotes Bhusri on this agentic play: “The 150th feature in HR or finance is not going to move the needle for our business. The next agentic application will.”
SAP Sapphire 2026 – SAP CTO Philipp Herzig on SAP’s API policy changes, and why “organizational memory” matters for agentic AI – Here’s my rundown on some of the hottest issues at SAP Sapphire, and how user groups responded to SAP’s position.
Accounting, assurance, and agentic – Sage Group CEO Stephen Hare sets out his stall to meet Finance customer needs – Sage is halfway through the fiscal year – time for a progress report. Stuart quotes Hare on AI expectations: “Nearly right is wrong. So whether it be payroll, whether it be financial, it has to be right. These systems and processes are run by finance professionals who have personal responsibility for making sure that they’re right.”
diginomica event coverage – the silly season hit another high pitch, as we spread across tarmacs and time zones to get you the on-the-ground news/views and use cases. Chris posted this roundup from Amsterdam: CamundaCon26 – CEO and CTO explain the critical need to orchestrate agentic AI to prevent chaos. I issued a podcast with Brian Sommer from our time at Epicor Insights, but that was just the beginning:
Blue Yonder, ICON 2026 – Derek anchored our wall-to-wall ICON coverage:
That framing – the agent is the app – is one that plenty of vendors are privately working toward but few are prepared to state directly, because of what it implies for per-seat SaaS economics and the value of proprietary interfaces [ICON 2026 — Blue Yonder CEO Duncan Angove isn’t nervous to say ‘the agent is the app’ (or that the SI industry is about to become a product feature)]
Meanwhile, Mark Chillingworth hit the show floor at Confluent Current London, and posted Confluent Current London 2026 – AI requires a data re-think: “Unifying data and creating a single source of the truth has been a key theme of the CIO community for close to two decades. AI is increasing that requirement.” Also see: Mark’s Confluent Current London 2026 – how customers simplify the data challenge.
Alteryx Inspire 2026 – Alyx was stateside, to bring the converging issues of data layers and agentic pros/cons to the test:
The modal experience is being talked at by someone reading from a deck about an architecture I cannot inspect, fronting for an LLM I cannot interrogate, producing outcomes I cannot reproduce…
Maths, layers and documentation matter. The people deploying this technology need to remember that, before the auditors and the regulators remember it for them. [Math, not Frankenstein architecture – why Alteryx Inspire 2026 drew a hard line on what Large Language Models cannot do]
Yeah, that’s a quote of the week if I ever saw one. Also see: Alyx’s Whose job is it to govern enterprise AI? Alteryx Inspire 2026 makes the case for putting analysts in charge.
Ah, but it’s not a wrap yet, because Zendesk Relate was also underway. This time, Ian was on the case: Zendesk Relate 2026 – Zendesk prepares for an outcome-based future built on ‘verified resolutions’: “Zendesk’s history in service gives it a large base of interaction data, operational patterns and service context from which to build models that assess whether work has actually been completed. That may ultimately prove more important than any agent announcement in winning customer trust.” Also see: Ian’s Zendesk Relate 2026 – Zendesk prepares for an outcome-based future built on ‘verified resolutions’.
Phew – okay, let’s double-check our boarding passes now…
A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:
Jon’s grab bag – Madeline has our tech-for-good jolt in Digital re-greening – how green tech charity Justdiggit is using AI and mobile apps to connect with local communities. Also see: Madeline’s next feature in here signature series: What I’d say to me back then – Clari + Salesloft’s Laurie Ehrbar on why women need an at bat, not a handout.
Stuart has the stories you missed in The long and the short of IT – the week in digibytes. He also has the anti-climactic end of the legal battle of AI kingpins in Altman 1, Musk 0 – but the AI titans court clash ends on a technicality, not with OpenAI cleared of charges. Finally, Stuart aired it out in memorable style in Something for the weekend – did AI kill off HR’s empathy along with the “lower-value human capital”?
Best of the enterprise web
My top seven
Token economics versus enterprise productivity – where do we go from here? See: Uber president says AI spending is getting ‘harder to justify’ – We’re seeing some high profile stories on token-maxxing hangovers hitting hard (in addition to the Uber story making the rounds, we have The Low-Down: Microsoft Cancels Internal Anthropic Licenses As Shift To Token-Based AI Billing Blows Up Annual Budgets In Months. First, an Uber quote from The Verge:
After reportedly exhausting its annual AI budget just four months into 2026, Uber is now questioning whether it’s actually seeing meaningful returns on its investments. In an interview with Rapid Response, Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said the company isn’t seeing a connection between rising token consumption for Claude Code and more useful features being delivered to consumers.
Quotes like these are a big reason why I’ve insisted – much to the chagrin of some analyst colleagues – that this is not the year of AI results, but the year of AI readiness. Pricing is too much of a moving target; the margin for error nailing down real business gains is too thin. (I’ve never througt productivity was the right ROI frame for AI anyhow).
If there is a silver lining here, it’s that many enterprise use cases can get by just fine on open source or smaller, fit-to-purpose models, as a number of vendors (and customers) are figuring out. Lower your frontier model dependence, and the cost structure improves – along with your margin of error as you apply this tech to crucial processes. On the other hand, if you need the latest and supposedly greatest, e.g. Claude Code, you may find yourself looking at the same financial mirror Uber and Microsoft just had a hard look into…
Google’s overhaul marks the end of the internet’s golden age – Finally, I’ve been asked how this search change impacts diginomica. We hope very little, and for that, we have loyal readers like you to thank. Is it good for society and culture that AI vendors freely trained on authoritative material, and now do everything they can to avoid linking to it? No – and I’d argue it ‘s not good for future iterations of their AI either, unless companies like Google wants their problematic AI search results to become more inferior via generations of AI self-slop training cycles. But this short-sighted thinking disguised as long-term vision is where we’ve arrived… meanwhile, diginomica will continue to freely share our content.
Information accessibility is a core value here, and we’ll take our chances. We have plenty going on with our own so-called “AEO” plans; no organizations can sit still; we certainly won’t, it’s not in our nature. I’ll say this much: no reader should take any valuable source of accessible content for granted (I now support a number of sites financially myself, including Wikipedia).
Your best support of diginomica is organic – argue about our content online, share it where it hits you or is relevant to your concerns, and something tells me we’ll all be fine somehow. Let’s create such value together as we always have, and apply that to the change at hand..
Whiffs
Perhaps “Black Mirror” wasn’t the best pop culture reference?
That went well…
Flying humanoid robots, we hardly knew ye…
See you next time… If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses – in a good or bad way – let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed.