The Gilbane Advisor

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Adobe announces updated Firefly

April 24, 2025 /

Adobe updated Firefly, their all-in-one app for AI-assisted content ideation, creation and production. Firefly empowers creators to generate images, video, audio and vectors from a single place with creative control, iterate on their creations across Adobe’s creative apps and seamlessly deliver them into production. The choice of partner models includes Google Cloud and OpenAI and AI-powered tools deeply integrated into Creative Cloud apps.

Firefly includes all of Adobe’s commercially safe creative AI models, including the new Firefly Image Model 4 for lifelike images, the new Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra for detail and complexity and the Firefly Video Model which generates footage from text prompts and images with creative control.

Firefly also provides creative professionals with the choice to explore in different aesthetic styles using models from partners, with Google Cloud and OpenAI models available today and models from partners including fal .ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika and Runway available in the coming months. The all-new Firefly Boards, now in public beta in Firefly, gives creators an AI-first surface for moodboarding, exploring creative concepts, iterating on hundreds of variations at once and collaborating on ideation. 

Creators can use Firefly on the web today, with the mobile app coming soon.

https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/firefly/gen-ai-approach.html

Elastic’s Cloud Serverless now on Google Cloud Marketplace

April 24, 2025 /

From the Elastic blog…

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Google Cloud — now available in the Iowa (us-central1) region. Elastic Cloud Serverless provides the fast way to start and scale observability, security, and search solutions without managing infrastructure. Built on the Search AI Lake architecture, which leverages Google Cloud Storage, it combines storage, separate storage and compute, low-latency querying, and advanced AI capabilities.

  • No compromise on speed or scale: Elasticsearch Serverless dynamically scales to accommodate your workload, handling unpredictable traffic spikes automatically — all while delivering low-latency search on boundless object storage.
  • Hassle-free operations: Say goodbye to managing clusters, provisioning nodes, or fine-tuning performance. Free your team from operational tasks — no need to manage infrastructure, do capacity planning, upgrade, or scale data. 
  • Purpose-built product experience: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a streamlined workflow to help you create projects tailored to your unique use cases in observability, security, and search. With guided onboarding, you can use in-product resources and tools that guide you every step of the way, accelerating time to value.
  • Flexible usage-based pricing model: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a usage-based pricing model that scales with your needs.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-serverless-google-cloud-general-availability

Gilbane Advisor 4-23-25 — Enterprise software & IA, GenAI therapy

April 23, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Michael Andrews, and Marc Zao-Sanders.

Additional reading comes from Daniel Tunkelang, Bryan Perozzi, Lauren Feiner & Alex Heath, and Muneeb Sikhani.

News comes from Sitecore & Microsoft, InfluxData, Altair & Databricks, and Deepgram.

Our next issue arrives April 30.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

Information architecture for software platforms

Michael Andrews reviews the complexities of enterprise software and the critical role of information architecture (IA). His non-technical article is valuable for anyone not experienced in enterprise applications, whether software engineer, product manager, business analyst, or senior manager, and a must-read for anyone considering a major role for AI agents in mission-critical industry applications. (14 min)

https://storyneedle.com/information-architecture-for-software-platforms/

How people are really using Gen AI in 2025

Marc Zao-Sanders follows-up on his year-old article on how people are using Gen AI. Note that he isn’t talking about Gen AI business use cases, which makes his findings a bit less surprising. (10 min)

https://hbr.org/2025/04/how-people-are-really-using-gen-ai-in-2025

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All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Sitecore launches AI Innovation Lab

Created in collaboration with Microsoft to provide a guided environment for marketing professionals to explore AI-driven solutions for optimizing content operations.
https://www.sitecore.com/products/ai-innovation-lab

Altair partners with Databricks

Providing seamless connection between Altair RapidMiner and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, amplifying data science & machine learning capabilities.
https://altair.com/altair-rapidminer ■ https://www.databricks.com

InfluxData releases InfluxDB 3 Core and InfluxDB 3 Enterprise

InfluxDB 3 Core is an open source, high-speed, recent-data engine for real-time applications. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise adds high availability and enhanced security.
https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdata-announces-influxdb-3-OSS-GA

Introducing Aura-2: Enterprise-grade text-to-speech

Aura-2 reflects the priorities of enterprise voice AI, delivering high-quality, context-aware speech designed for the scale, precision, and resilience for business-critical environments.
https://deepgram.com/learn/introducing-aura-2-enterprise-text-to-speech

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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Sitecore launches AI Innovation Lab

April 16, 2025 /

Sitecore, a provider of digital experience and content management software, launched Sitecore AI Innovation Lab, a program created in collaboration with Microsoft that provides a guided environment for marketing professionals to rapidly explore AI-driven solutions for optimizing content operations. It helps marketers define their AI journey and fast track the development of solutions best suited for their specific use cases.

A Sitecore AI Innovation Lab guided environment explores AI-driven solutions with Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Services. Participants work alongside Sitecore and Microsoft experts to prototype solutions for their unique challenges using an agile, low risk approach. The result is either a validated AI solution or learnings to help marketers achieve their business objectives. AI innovations developed with customers will be integrated into Sitecore’s DXP to further enhance, improve and future-proof the platform.

Sitecore recently released more than 250 enhancements for its composable DXP to help marketers create, build, and optimize digital experiences and content that align with their brand identity and drive engagement and conversions. Sitecore Stream helps marketers meet evolving customer expectations by speeding the creation and delivery of personalized digital experiences across all touchpoints.

The Sitecore AI Innovation Lab is available to current Sitecore customers.

https://www.sitecore.com/products/ai-innovation-lab

Altair partners with Databricks

April 16, 2025 /

Altair, a global provider in computational intelligence, has partnered with Databricks, a data and AI company, to provide joint customers with capabilities for data unification, graph-powered intelligence, and enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI).

Customers can use Altair RapidMiner to access, prepare, and analyze data in Databricks without data duplication. The platform’s full-stack AI capabilities—from low-code AutoML to MLOps, agent frameworks, and high-speed visualization, allow organizations to prototype, deploy, and scale AI applications using data stored in Databricks.

A key differentiator is Altair RapidMiner’s massively parallel processing (MPP) knowledge graph technology, purpose-built to support knowledge graph creation, data fabrics, and ontology modeling at enterprise scale. By integrating with Databricks, customers can use the Altair RapidMiner knowledge graph engine to connect, contextualize, and activate all types of data—structured, unstructured, and streaming. These graph-powered fabrics form the foundation for a new generation of intelligent systems, enabling generative AI models and autonomous agents to navigate the full complexity of an organization’s digital operations.

Altair RapidMiner also offers native support for SAS language execution, allowing customers to preserve and extend the value of their existing analytics investments while modernizing their workflows.

https://altair.com/altair-rapidminer ■ https://www.databricks.com

Introducing Aura-2: Enterprise-grade text-to-speech

April 15, 2025 /

Deepgram, a voice AI platform for enterprise use cases, announced Aura‑2, its next-generation text-to-speech (TTS) model purpose-built for real-time voice applications in mission-critical business environments. Engineered for clarity, consistency, low-latency performance, and deployable via cloud or on-premises APIs, Aura‑2 enables developers to build scalable, human-like voice experiences for automated interactions across the enterprise, including customer support, virtual agents, and AI-powered assistants. Aura-2 is built on Deepgram Enterprise Runtime—the infrastructure that powers the company’s speech-to-text (STT) and speech-to-speech (STS) capabilities, providing enterprises with the control, adaptability, and performance required to deploy and scale production-grade voice AI.

A significant gap exists between entertainment-focused models and the operational demands of enterprise-grade voice systems. Entertainment-focused TTS platforms are trained on and optimized for storytelling, character voices, and emotionally expressive delivery. Enterprise applications require more than natural-sounding voices, they demand domain-specific pronunciation, a professional tone, consistent contextual handling, and the ability to perform reliably, cost-effectively, and securely, often in environments that require full deployment control.

Aura-2 is powered by Deepgram Enterprise Runtime (DER)—a custom-built infrastructure layer that runs all of Deepgram’s speech models. Designed specifically for enterprise-grade performance, DER orchestrates voice AI in real time with the speed, reliability, and adaptability required for production-scale deployments.

Introducing Aura-2: Enterprise-Grade Text-to-Speech

InfluxData releases InfluxDB 3 Core and InfluxDB 3 Enterprise

April 15, 2025 /

InfluxData, a time series database, announced the general availability of InfluxDB 3 Core and InfluxDB 3 Enterprise. Built for rapid development and large-scale production, Core and Enterprise provide a high-performance, easily scalable database for managing time series data. InfluxDB 3 Core is an open source, high-speed, recent-data engine for real-time applications. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise adds high availability, enhanced security, and scalability for production environments. Both bring data transformation, enrichment, and alerting directly into the database with a built-in Python Processing Engine, elevating InfluxDB to an active intelligence engine for real-time data.

InfluxDB 3 Core is open source under the permissive MIT/Apache 2 license. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise extends Core’s capabilities with enterprise-grade features for production workloads, including multi-region durability, read replicas, automatic failover, and enhanced security. Both products run in a lightweight, single-node setup for fast, easy deployment.

Powered by the new InfluxDB 3 engine written in Rust and built with Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, and Flight, Core and Enterprise deliver performance gains and architectural flexibility compared to previous open source versions of InfluxDB.

InfluxDB 3 Core is now available as a free and open source download. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is available for production deployments with flexible licensing options.

https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdata-announces-influxdb-3-OSS-GA

Gilbane Advisor 4-9-25 — LLM biology, AI Index

April 9, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Jack Lindsey, et al, and Eliza Strickland.

Additional reading comes from Omer Goldman & Uri Shaham, Steven Sinofsky, Volodymyr Pavlyshyn, and Adam Bignell.

News comes from MindsDB, Access Innovations, Perplexity & firmly.ai, and Contentful.

Our next issue arrives April 23.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

On the biology of a large language model

Jack Lindsey and his colleagues at Anthropic…
“The black-box nature of models is increasingly unsatisfactory as they advance in intelligence and are deployed in a growing number of applications. Our goal is to reverse engineer how these models work on the inside, so we may better understand them and assess their fitness for purpose.”

Anthropic’s new research into how LLMs “think” is fascinating. Don’t be put off by the length of their paper — you can learn a lot by reading some of the introductory material, the discussion at the end, and then surfing the case studies and topics in-between. (1 hr 49 min)

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html

12 graphs that explain the state of AI in 2025

The always useful and free AI Index from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is available. The 455 page 2025 issue is “stuffed with graphs and data on the topics of R&D, technical performance, responsible AI, economic impacts, science and medicine, policy, education, and public opinion.” IEEE Spectrum’s Eliza Strickland provides highlights and links to the full report. (7 min)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-index-2025

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

MindsDB brings federated data access to Model Context Protocol

MindsDB & MCP enables AI applications and agents to run federated queries over data stored in different databases and applications as if they were a single database.
https://mindsdb.com

Access Innovations releases Data Harmony 3.17

The new version includes knowledge maps that illustrate the linkages (with color-coded legends) between categories and terms in a taxonomy.
https://www.accessinn.com/data-harmony-products/

Perplexity integrates firmly.ai ecommerce technology

By embedding firmly.ai’s commerce platform, Perplexity users can now complete their entire shopping journey, from product discovery to secure transaction, without leaving the platform.
https://www.firmly.ai ■ https://www.perplexity.ai

Contentful launches new CMS capabilities and Shopify partnership

New AI and personalization capabilities for technical teams build on the company’s CMS, and Contentful Studio, and a low-code product for marketing teams.
https://www.contentful.com/newsroom/contentful-reveals-next-phase-of-growth-with-modern-digital-experience

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

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