Tech Disruptors

“Merchants can bet on Shopify and not worry about falling behind the cutting edge here,” explains the company’s vice president of product, Glen Coates, to Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana on the latest episode of Tech Disruptors. “We are extremely good at software, so merchants can be really good at what they’re trying to build into their business.” The two delve into a broad range of topics and assess the problems facing merchants, discussing how Shopify addresses such issues in a highly unified and integrated manner. Coates compares the needs of an entrepreneur with those of an enterprise, talking through several product areas, including point-of-sale, logistics, capital lending and generative AI.

US companies are experiencing about 1,800 attacks every week through attempted incursions that are more sophisticated than in years past. Check Point’s chairman and co-founder Gil Shwed discusses the outlook for cybersecurity in 2025 with Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Firewalls, hyperscaler cloud capex, CrowdStrike’s mid-year IT outage, US elections, data security for large language model deployments and potential consolidation are some of the topics that were discussed.

As AI moves toward agentic systems capable of performing tasks with minimal human intervention, guardrails setting boundaries and human verification of potentially unsafe output become crucial for enterprise applications, according to Salesforce executive vice president and chief scientist Silvio Savarese. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Savarese and Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana take an in-depth look at the differences between gen-AI assistants and the agents, which the company announced at its Dreamforce 2024 conference. Other topics include the application of small vs. large language models, enterprise AI vs. that for the general public and security.

Enterprise work-management tools are likely to show dramatic development with growing machine-learning capabilities, more capable foundational models and the potential rollout of AI agents. This could bring opportunities as well as challenges, particularly in a space that’s highly fragmented. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, ClickUp founder and CEO Zeb Evans joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss the shifting landscape of work-management solutions as AI capabilities and tools continue to grow. They examine the impact of the changes on competition, and the importance of scale. They also talk about ClickUp’s product journey, how its solutions differ from peers and potential revenue models.