Alessandro Perilli

What will happen to enterprise AI funding in Q2–Q3 2027? Our @IDC Sourcing Advisory Services team is seeing phenomenal discounts offered by frontier AI labs to our clients, both for enterprise seats and API access. Our research indicates that a substantial portion of the budget for AI agents is allocated to services that are covered by promotional credits or offered at introductory rates. When those credits expire and introductory rates end sometime next year, organizations worldwide will have to reevaluate the cost of their AI initiatives and determine whether the value they deliver still justifies the price. (Just one of the 100+ slides in my AI Economics keynote deck)

After my keynote at our @IDC AI & Autonomy Forum in Tokyo, I spent three days visiting some of Japan's largest organizations to show them our latest AI Economics data. Japan is the first place where I've spoken about the economic opportunity associated with sovereign AI, an opportunity that almost no one is really pursuing. I did so partly because Japan is ahead of many of the other top 10 economic powers in executing its national AI strategy, and partly because we are finally about to publish a report on the subject after months of research (stay tuned, I'll say a lot more soon). Yet, I didn't get the opportunity to tell the full story in any of these meetings. We have too much data. I'll have my chance during another client presentation next week, when I will be given 60 minutes to talk about AI budget governance strategies and spending trends, cost structures and approaches to value realization for AI initiatives, AI pricing model preferences and established contract terms, AI cost management tool selection and missing capabilities, and more. OK. Perhaps 60 minutes won't be enough...

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Original picture:

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This weekend, I finally decided to build the very first Star Trek set ever produced by LEGO, which is, of course, the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D from The Next Generation series (the only real Star Trek). The building techniques used in this set are mind-blowing: the designers had to go out of their way to recreate the many curves of the Enterprise-D with LEGO bricks. It really opens your mind to the possibilities still to be explored with this medium and makes you wonder how much more sophisticated LEGO sets will become as AI assists with their development. To show you the outcome of two people working for eight hours, I took some pictures, but there’s a twist. When I shoot on my iPhone, I usually use Project Indigo from Adobe Labs. When I opened the app this weekend, I discovered I’d been selected to try new AI-assisted editing capabilities. Sounded fun. So I went through the pictures I’d just taken, one by one, and asked it to apply a Cinematic effect. I expected a clever filter, similar to the ML Enhance feature in Pixelmator Pro. But no. Project Indigo changed the camera angle in each picture, completely relit the scene, and added lighting features to the LEGO set. The results are the two pictures you see above. To appreciate how far the AI went without hallucinating too many details, you have to see the original pictures, which I’ve posted in the comments. Very impressive in terms of both quality and speed. Now, time for Agentic Sunday.

My collaboration with Japan began almost 20 years ago, when Networld used to translate my work on virtualization[.]info into Japanese within 24 hours of publication. I continued collaborating with Japanese teams in other roles, and I’ve always been impressed by their strong work ethic, incredible attention to detail, and exquisite craftsmanship, even in software. So it’s with great pleasure that I return to Japan next month to speak at our IDC AI & Autonomy Forum in Tokyo. After the event, I look forward to meeting our clients there and the many CIOs who are transforming the Japanese economy with AI. 日本の皆さんとの協業が始まったのは、今から約20年前のことです。当時、Networldの皆さんは、私がvirtualization[.]infoに掲載した記事を、公開から24時間以内に日本語に翻訳してくださっていました。その後もさまざまな立場で日本のチームとの協業を続けてきましたが、仕事に真摯に向き合う姿勢、細部への徹底したこだわり、そしてソフトウェアにも感じられる見事な職人技に、いつも感銘を受けてきました。こうしたご縁もあり、来月、東京で開催する「IDC AI & Autonomy Forum」に登壇するため、再び日本を訪れることを大変うれしく思っています。 イベント後には、日本のお客様、そしてAIを通じて日本経済の変革を進める多くのCIOの皆様にお会いできることを楽しみにしています。

Yesterday, I got a chance to see the latest ByteDance models at the BytePlus Global Tour event in London. I left the world of synthetic media generation seven months ago to join IDC, so I was really curious to see how much progress had been made since then. After the event, a long, stimulating conversation about art, storytelling, and the economics of AI filmmaking with Henry Yan. @jiang4ai