Warning that businesses that ignore machine learning will "be left in the dust," Workday CEO and longtime cloud evangelist Aneel Bhusri said yesterday that machine learning will become even more disruptive than the cloud computing he's helped turn into a global phenomenon. Those would be strong words from any executive. But when they come from Bhusri--one of the leading advocates of and evangelists for cloud computing over the past 14 years--they dramatically underscore the scale and scope of ML's impact on the business world. In his keynote address opening his company's annual Workday Rising customer conference, Bhusri pegged ML as one of the three top-priority areas at fast-growing Workday as it gets closer to topping $1 billion in quarterly revenue. Bhusri's pointed and powerful focus on the ubiquitous role machine learning is playing at Workday comes at a critical time for the rapidly growing high-flier, which is #8 on my Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking.

Artificial intelligence has reached the once-stodgy world of ERP, with SAP and Oracle announcing AI applications just in the past year. When Infor joined the fray this month with Coleman, a new platform for AI applications, observers wondered how the vendor, which has a huge portfolio of legacy on-premises ERP brands, can make such a radical leap forward. The short answer: Require users to upgrade to the CloudSuite SaaS ERP package. "I thought Infor offered a coherent explanation as to how AI fits into the other layers of their software," said Jon Reed, an industry analyst and co-founder of Diginomica.com. "Duncan Angove, the president, did a nice job of talking about how we need enterprise apps to be more conversational."