Welcome to episode 338 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, Matt, and Jonathan are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bit of a buying spree (inlcuding whole power companies) Veo 3.1, Cowork, and more – today in the cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week

Snowflake’s Ironic Timing: Buying Downtime Prevention Tool While Experiencing Downtime
Flexera Buys ProsperOps and Chaos Genius, Promises Less Chaos and More Prosperity
Flexera Goes Shopping: Two FinOps Acquisitions to Prosper and Reduce Chaos
Token of Appreciation: Gemini CLI Now Tracks Every Penny of Your AI Spend
Snowflake Buys Observe to Stop Its Own Services from Melting Down
Google’s Veo 3.1 Goes Vertical: Finally Understanding How People Actually Hold Their Phones
Alphabet’s New Power Move: Buying the Company That Literally Powers Data Centers
Dashboard Confessional: Gemini CLI Gets Transparent About Its Usage
Microsoft’s New Agent Works 24/7 and Never Asks for a Raise
From Robot Vacuums That Climb Stairs to TVs You Can’t Feel: CES Gets Weird
Agent Shopping: When Your AI Has Better Taste Than You Do
The cloudpod hosts do not like any stories this week
AWS took a nap on announcements this week
Claude is my new co-worker
Wake up, AWS, and give us some fun news
The $200 Assistant: Is Cowork the End of Workplace Admins?
Azure has more interesting announcements than AWS oh noooo
If you can’t beat them in AI, just acquire everyone
Notebook LM turns the Data Tables on you

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money

01:11 Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing – Ars Technica

Anthropic launches Cowork, a new feature in the macOS Claude desktop app that extends Claude Code‘s agentic capabilities to general office work tasks.
Users can grant Claude access to specific folders and use plain language instructions to automate tasks like filling expense reports from receipt photos, writing reports from notes, or reorganizing files.
Cowork lowers the technical barrier compared to Claude Code by making AI-assisted file operations accessible to non-developer knowledge workers, including marketers and office staff.
The feature was developed after Anthropic observed users already applying Claude Code to general knowledge work despite its developer-focused positioning.
The tool provides similar functionality to what was possible through Model Context Protocol integrations, but offers a more streamlined interface with Claude Code-style usability improvements.
Users can submit new requests or modifications to ongoing tasks without waiting for the initial assignment to complete.
Cowork represents a strategic expansion of Anthropic’s agentic AI approach beyond software development into broader productivity workflows.

338: T5Gemma Says “AI’ll be Back”