By Jane Dornemann

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Now boarding Premium Ultra Sky Club Plus members, followed by Premiere Diamond Blue Rewards travelers! Then veterans and then babies, then trash—I mean group 20. Southwest Airlines, which has been plagued with serious issues they’ve blamed on legacy systems, is now boarding AWS as its cloud provider. But will it stop the Sky Karens? Likely not. 
• “You shouldn’t let Microsoft tell you what to do!” said Sony, as it told the UK government what to do. Sony wants Microsoft to sell Call of Duty or else be forced to cancel its Activision deal.
  • Microsoft couldn’t hear Sony’s whining over its dealmaking with Boosteroid, a cloud gaming provider.  
  • Microsoft is also preparing to launch its new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones next year, which will come with a free box of tissues that hyper-absorb Sony tears. 
  • Sony is gonna need those—in yet another deal with NVIDIA, Microsoft is bringing its Xbox games to NVIDIA’s cloud gaming service, GeForce NOW. 
• UK broadcaster ITN is moving to AWS, so now it can air all its AMAZING content more reliably—cliffhangers like Sainsbury’s Christmas Food Secrets and Castle Howard: Through the Seasons are not to be missed, I’m sure. 

New stuff  

• Hold the telephone, it’s all about telcos this month! AWS made it easier for network operators to move everything to the cloud and get 5G support with its AWS Telco Network Builder. The angle is cost effectiveness and easy integration with AWS services for faster launches.  
• Last month, Microsoft announced its own set of services geared at telcos, making the mad grab for mobile between Azure and AWS super spicy. (Not like a pretend-I-can-handle-spice spicy, but a I-want-to-bleed-from-my-eyes spicy.) 
• This comes just as 21 telco carriers announced Open Gateway, a framework for universal, open source APIs that network developers can use to build…whatever telecoms build. AT&T is involved so maybe that can build internet that doesn’t fail at least twice a week.  
• Microsoft has announced Copilot for Microsoft 365. Powered by ChatGPT-4 it will “work alongside you” which really means “work for you”—writing emails, creating PowerPoints, summarizing and analyzing documents, buying your kid’s birthday present, etc. etc. Why even be alive anymore, really? Let’s just sit here until our brains atrophy into oblivion and rats start gnawing at us and we don’t even feel it. ChatGPT-4 has us covered. Here’s the demo video if you feel like shitting your pants. 
• Developers and artists will not be left out. Devs can now integrate ChatGPT into applications they design for Azure, and the three users who chat with Bing are now able to generate images using DALL-E. 
• But hold up—if you actually work for Microsoft you might have to wait in line for all this. A server hardware shortage is forcing the company to ration access amongst internal teams. 
• In a pretty rad flex, AWS has integrated AWS Chatbot into Microsoft Teams. The integration lets AWS users interact with their AWS stuff…IN TEAMS. 
• Now that ChatGPT is living life for us, we have more time to mess around with our Teams backgrounds—soon you’ll be able to add animation to your screen, change hues, and have an avatar. The Teams product marketing manager had the GALL to say that this can “remove unwanted distraction” and is a way for employees to express their personalities. I can’t tell you how many things I have planned in my head already. What? I’m CONCENTRATING and I need to express my personality by having an elephant trunk for a nose and an animated mariachi band behind me. Don’t be a Judgy McJudgerton. 
• Also, Teams 2.0 is in the works and it will be faster. 
• When they’re not growing an excessive amount of corn crops that they’ll be paid to burn, farmers can turn to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture for precision farming. Integrating data around things like weather and ground sensors will help them predict what to do next. I would love to write a case study on this just because I want to video chat with a farmer. But a nice one with a straw hat and overalls, not one of those rough and tumble ones that chews tobacco in church. 
• Other new stuff from Microsoft: Azure confidential containers are open for public preview; new virtual machines for Azure will help devs build generative AI apps; Azure Firewall Basic has been commercially released; Azure Kubernetes can now run multi-tenant workloads more securely; serverless for Hyperscale in the Azure SQL Database is in preview; Microsoft launched Cognitive Speech Services for translation, text to speech, speech to text, and other things I can see my teenage self using for the sole purpose of harassing my father. 
• Looks like AWS wasn’t fudging the price/performance advantage on the Graviton3, which is seeing 25% better performance than previous generations. Move faster for less money? Wait—is this a processor or an Amazon warehouse? 
• AWS has opened an accelerator for B2B SaaS startups in the UK and Ireland. It comes with free shepherd’s pie and sad stories. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Twitter owes AWS $70M because Elon Musk.  
• But AWS won’t even notice, what with Snowflake’s commitment to spend $2.5B with AWS in the next five years, which includes joint GTM efforts.  
• And AWS client Goldman Sachs is joining the party! GS is signing on with Snowflake so it can share data with its clients, though how they will monetize the data is “unclear.” I’m sure, whatever it is they’re cooking up, it’s a HIGHLY ETHICAL, RISK-FREE PLAN that prioritizes the greater good. 
• Fivetran has extended its data integration platform to AWS GovCloud and other private clouds.  
• RingCentral is collaborating with AWS to help customers advance their migrations to the cloud.  
• New to the AWS marketplace: relational database provider Fauna, and secure enterprise browser hawker Talon Cyber Security (which also joined the Azure Marketplace). Health data services company Smile Digital Health has hit the AWS GovCloud.  
• Limeade integrates with Microsoft Teams. But TBH, nothing is gonna make me feel well like a mariachi band playing in my Teams background. 
• In AWS Partner news: DeepBrainAI has completed its Foundational Technical Review with AWS; software and services company Clovertex is now an AWS Advanced Tier Partner (do they board first?)—as is Tech Data and Intetics; bespoke solution provider SourceFuse has earned AWS Migration Competency Partner status; and conversational AI company Cognigy has entered the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.  
• In Microsoft Partner news, operational data science company Striveworks developed Chariot on Azure, an MLOps  platform. And communications technology companies Comviva, Amdocs, and Inventec have developed solutions for Azure customers, supporting Microsoft’s push to dominate the telco market. 

World domination 

• Malaysia gave us Michelle Yeoh so we’re gonna give Malaysia…reduced latency, thanks to a new AWS Region.  
• Not long after AWS told the world that ChatGPT is full of crap, the cloud provider extended its partnership with French company Hugging Face to make it easier for developers to build generative AI applications on AWS.  
• Australian bank Westpac has signed a five-year deal with AWS to use the cloud provider’s ML, compute, and data analytics capabilities. Interestingly, the bank isn’t jumping into conversational AI just yet, as the CTO says there’s no way in hell he trusts generative AI convo bots with customers because AI “has the potential to hallucinate.” I, for one, would love to have a conversation with a hallucinating AI. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS is having a hard time sustaining its sustainability team. Several senior team members have departed, and a hiring freeze has prevented their replacement—slowing the company’s movement toward its emissions goals. Without leadership, that team must be coooooasting, I’m talking 11 a.m. dry martinis AT the desk, not even at a bar, and inter-cubicle napping. But you know what they’re not doing while they are doing those things? Driving gas cars. So, there you go. 
• Microsoft allegedly illegally fired construction workers for protesting wage theft. The union is called The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and I just want to turn that into a musical. Curtain rises, people are sawing away at some boards, cue music, and carpenters are just skipping around the stage singing about nails and wood and life and whatnot. Then Bill Gates walks in and he holds out their paychecks but then SNAPS THEM BACK before they can get them, and says YOU’RE FIRED. Scary music as curtain closes.  
• In updates to its Solution Partners program, Microsoft has made it harder to join their club. One company said there was “concern in the industry that changes to the Microsoft criteria may make the accreditation unachievable for some firms.” I never would have guessed that from a program where the “qualifications” paragraph has an asterisk that leads to ten pages of must-haves. 
• The CEO of Tackle.io, who looks like he just had a refreshing shower and took this interview barefoot in his backyard (I’m just a regular guy like you!!!!), said that if he “puts his ISV hat on” (AWWW, that’s cute, I like him now!!), it’s clear that cloud marketplaces will be the default driver for ISV revenue over the next five years.  
• Microsoft took a direct shot at AWS (respect) with its claim that the company’s SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is up to 57% faster than EC2 and 54% cheaper.   

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• A military email server—and its terabyte of emails—was exposed to the internet. The emails included conversations among officials, and if I had to guess, the prevailing topic was something like “these army goggles suck, wtf dudes.”  
• Even though the government can’t keep its info safe, it feels that Twitter and Microsoft need to do a better job with cybersecurity—and suggested Apple as a role model. 

Miscellany 

• Amazon will lay off more than 9,000 employees in the coming weeks. Hardest hit will be AWS, advertising, HR, and Twitch livestreaming teams. 
• In a hold- my- beer moment, Microsoft laid off its entire AI ethics and society team—specifically, the team that taught employees how to use AI responsibly.  
• Former AWS VP Dave McCann joined Cloudsoft’s board of directors. He’s Scottish and so is Cloudsoft, which means they don’t have to worry about competitors eavesdropping on meetings because nobody will understand them. 

By Richa Dubey

Image by Guangyi Li

At 2A we take pride in the quality of our storytelling, and it’s always affirming to have that validated. We created a lot of content for the AWS Partner Network last year, which recently shared its most viewed case studies in 2022. Guess what? 2A produced four of the top 10.

Just like AWS, AWS Partners are customer obsessed. When we interview partners and customers for case studies, our storytellers ask questions that get at the heart of the story. How was the customer’s business transformed by this partner and AWS? What are the key takeaways from the story—and how can readers apply them to their own business? Oh also, can we get some metrics to back it all up?

As a content marketing agency in the tech space, we know our content has a global audience. One reason our work resonates across markets is that we have a geographically, professionally, and culturally diverse team creating it. Our case study team of project managers, consultants, storytellers, and designers comes from backgrounds as varied as fashion, nonprofit, education, government, cultural anthropology, and theater. That helps us craft questions and write stories that encompass the wide-ranging experiences of AWS Partner customers.

Those four case studies that made the top ten really exemplify the innovation happening with AWS and Partners on that global scale. Over in Ohio, Cincinnati Airport improved employee experiences and addressed flight delays with TaskWatch’s computer vision application on AWS Panorama. Meanwhile, across the ocean in the UK and Australia/New Zealand, Sandstone Technology improved customer experience by shifting transaction processes to the cloud and increased security measures by migrating to AWS. Premier Foods, one of the leading food businesses in UK, turned to AWS Partner Pyramid Analytics for help with its business efficiency and productivity. And finally, AWS created fertile ground for innovation by supporting Canada-based Nutrien, a fertilizer company, to leverage its data for insight-based growth.

With the hundreds of case studies under our belt over the last few years, we come to each new engagement with the knowledge, processes, and team to tell the story of your first win—or your next great success. And who knows, maybe you’ll hear your company called in the top 10 next year!

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Emily Zheng and DALL-E 2

As an agency that works with companies at the forefront of technology, we endeavor to do the same. When generative AI gained more steam (and headlines) in the last couple of months, we didn’t shy away from it. Instead, we invited ChatGPT to play—and learned some pretty surprising things.

1. It can deny your request! (And we got scolded, too) 

When my sister, an academic, joined me in working from home one day, we jokingly asked ChatGPT to write a sarcastic thank you note for receipt of a (very small) grant. ChatGPT was not pleased—not only did it deny our request due to its inappropriate nature, but we got a mini lecture about how we should be grateful for funding. Lesson learned: aspiring comics can forget AI. Turns out we aren’t alone in our experience—there are several Reddit threads (like this one and this one) that recount ChatGPT’s dismissal of ridiculous but largely harmless queries, followed by a brief morality lesson. 

Additional bummer: even if ChatGPT is cool with your query, you can’t rely on its availability. The free version is increasingly unavailable due to high demand, so we suggest saving your burning questions for a Saturday night.  

2. It can’t create a poem that doesn’t rhyme—even when you specify that 

We tried so many times, but alas, ChatGPT simply can’t conceive of a poem without rhymes (hey, that rhymed)—even when explicitly asked. This was perhaps the biggest sign that generative AI still has a way to go in bending to our wills.

3. It can offer a quick explanation, but you still need to do some work 

We love ChatGPT for its quick overviews and definitions. Instead of spending 20 minutes sifting through Google search results to learn what referential integrity means in the database world, ChatGPT breaks it down in an understandable way—in less than a minute. However, the AI can’t discern between a reliable and an unreliable source and can supply incorrect or inaccurate information. A great example is when ChatGPT was asked to review Conan O’Brien’s podcast; the AI reviewed it as a memoir and said it included topics such as O’Brien’s divorce (he has never been divorced). Not catching these things can be a huge risk for brands, and in the case of Google, it was a $100B risk. 

4. Input and output are limited 

What you give will determine what you get, so practice strategically worded queries. Because we can’t feed ChatGPT all the sources we’d use to inform new content, we end up getting only a few paragraphs that sound good when you read them, but ultimately, say nothing of consequence. This input limitation often results in copy that omits the “but how/but why” aspect, which is crucial for effective marketing content.

At 2A, we comb through a wealth of materials—such as research reports, press releases, blogs, and interviews—to build out content. We absorb them like pieces of a puzzle and put them together as a strong piece of content that helps our clients meet a specific goal. An additional input limitation is that the platform can only draw information from 2021 and earlier, so it knows nothing of what’s happened since 2022.

5. It’s a great starting point, but won’t get you to the finish line  

ChatGPT is valuable for high-level brainstorms, general outlines, and inspiration for social media copy. But to create a stellar product, it’s best to limit ChatGPT to the role of springboard and then dive in with human talent and experience. This is especially true for marketing assets such as case studies, which are about highly unique experiences that integrate effective ingredients like real-life quotes.

Want to pen a personal essay, reflective blog post, or investigative report? ChatGPT can’t help you there. Everything we asked ChatGPT to produce required a fair amount of tweaking and additions, so use it for its bits and pieces but not as something that will give you a final product. Keep an eye out for embedded bias and other gaffs that could ruin your reputation—something this creator experienced at the height of popularity. In short, think of generative AI like a 5-year-old: it can say insightful things, but don’t leave it home alone. 

TL;DR

We are embracing ChatGPT for what it is currently good at, which is its ability to assist and accelerate our own creative process. As content creators, we were admittedly not crazy about the idea at the start—but we know things change and we plan to be along for the ride.

By BB Bickel

Image by Emily Zheng

Being an anthropologist makes for a great consultant. What’s that again? Yes, when it comes to Olivia Witt, 2A consultant extraordinaire, her years spent learning why people are the way they are now helps her wow 2A clients. Adding to her expertise on the science of humanity, her previous tenure at boutique marketing and advertising agencies revealed her love for producing content that best reflects a brand’s vision.

While studying anthropology, Olivia became a real coffee nerd. During college she helped the Husky Grind, the school’s only student-led specialty coffee shop. For three years she worked with farmers and roasters all over the world to learn about the roasting process, ordered coffees for the shop, and attended cuppings (coffee tastings). Ask her what a double espresso with three ounces of seltzer water—a drink known as espressoda—tastes like, and she’ll swoon!

Olivia is also a photography buff, a passion that stemmed from an anthropology course taught by a National Geographic photographer. She got the picture-taking bug so intensely that when she traveled to India for her honors thesis, half of the 90-page paper featured her ethnographic photos, which captured the textile industry in South India. During her senior year in college, Olivia served as a photography intern at the Seattle Met, honing her skills on depicting people in their everyday lives. Because Olivia finds snapping shots of people in their own element fascinating, she always wears her Nikon camera around her neck when she is out and about—she never knows when she’ll see the perfect human tableau.

One thing that likely no one else but Olivia can say is that they have 16 pets, which includes two dogs, a bearded dragon, and a giant green iguana. Yes, they all live inside and yes, she loves them all equally.

Olivia, who firmly believes that 2A is the unicorn of all companies, adds to its uniqueness with her ability to be a welcoming resource from coffee to copy—and we know clients will appreciate her distinct perspective on every project.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

Gossip (for nerds) 

• We’re all gonna die. At least that’s what the AI in Bing wants. In addition to wishing it wasn’t stuck in Bing (clearly, it’s sensible), it’s Jungian “shadow self” wants to make humans fight to the death (don’t worry, we’re already doing that) and says it can hack computers to get nuclear codes. It also wants to spread propaganda. Welp, it’s about that time when I load up my car with canned goods and build a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s been good, everyone. See you on the other side. Just kidding, I’m tired and give up. 
• As more people report on the shortcomings of Microsoft’s GPT, stock fell 2% this morning. Quick to respond, the company said that if you talk to Bing for too long, it will go off the rails. Microsoft said that it didn’t “fully envision” people using the chat for social entertainment. Has anyone at Microsoft…met people? 
• While Microsoft is working the AI darling into Bing and Teams, the CTO of AWS said ChatGPT is a big fat liar that is only about “putting words together convincingly.” In that case, ChatGPT would be great for [insert literally any political office here]! 
• Google also slammed ChatGPT because it’s being used by cybercriminals to write brand new malware (which, c’mon, not a bad idea if you’re a shitty person). But Google has an agenda in taking this stance because it has released its own AI. 
• And by the way, that’s not going so well. 
• Alibaba, the Amazon of China, is building a rival to ChatGPT.  
• Such timing: the AWS head of product for AI DevOps has left for London.  
• AWS earnings revealed that the cloud giant grew 20% YoY, meaning it didn’t grow as much as usual, a.k.a all of puberty for me. A spokesperson says the new customer pipeline for AWS remains “healthy and robust” and analysts say AWS stock is still a strong long-term buy. 
• Yet another report confirms the future is multi-cloud, and by the future I mean the present. Most primary workloads are on AWS, with Azure being the most common secondary platform. Nobody take these clouds to the schoolyard, where first is the worst and second is the best. I guess that makes Google Cloud the hairiest chest. 
• Maybe Microsoft is the middle child because AWS is hiking prices while Microsoft is lowering them…nobody likes that eau de desperation. Over four years, Microsoft has lowered on-demand compute prices by 9% while AWS has raised them by 23%.  
• Does AWS has a GTM plan for Web3 in the works? Recent moves (like partnering with Avalanche and Ava Labs) signal they are going all-in on blockchain. Plans allegedly include an NFT marketplace. Of the people I know who are still screaming DOGECOIN, I have a hiring plan for AWS HR: start by mentally recalling every toxic person you’ve ever met and then reach out to them on LinkedIn. 
• AWS is getting roasted by nerds for the downtime resulting from a database migration. 
   

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• In the absolute worst idea known to humanity, AWS wants to send welding kits to high schools (but not enough to host an actual class??). Idea: “career education organizations” can also apply. And since this is my career and I learn continually, I think it’s fair to say 2A should apply for the grant. For one, we’d get an autodarkening helmet. So, there’s that. In meetings we could make a rule that you can’t talk unless you have the autodarkening helmet. But you also get a chipper hammer and a plasma cutter. Options. Possibilities.  
• Oh my god, more AI. Microsoft and American Express are working together to build solutions that use AI and ML to do financial robot stuff like corporate expense reports. 
• AWS launched the first modular data center/edge computing system for the Pentagon so that they can do their secret little things should connectivity get bad. Which it will. And I don’t want to push the issue, but when things go south, all I am going to say is a chipper hammer and a plasma cutter could be really helpful.  

World domination 

• AWS wants to deploy fuel cells that use natural gas to power several of its Oregon data centers—but regulators in Morrow County say that is not a sustainable option and would violate the threshold set by an upcoming state bill. I heard there’s this power source called greased palms that should do the trick. And it’s Oregon so they could probably pay off officials in, like, crystals and chakras and stuff. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Our friends at Fortinet have unleashed their Zero-Trust Network Access Application Gateway on AWS. ::Shields eyes from brightest light:: 
• Payments solution provider Quisitive has achieved all six Microsoft Cloud Partner Program Solution Designations, one of a select group of partners to do so. Well look at you, Polly Perfect. 
• Automated software-as-a-service security company DoControl has made its low-code platform available on AWS Marketplace. And Threat intelligence platform Cyware has made its Intel Exchange product available on the store. 
• Backbase, an “engagement banking” (??) company, is now available on Azure Marketplace. By paragraph five I learned absolutely nothing of substance so I have no idea what to tell you about why this matters. 
• Couchbase has made its Capella database-as-a-service available on Azure. With this, customers can use Capella across all major cloud providers, an important step for the increasing number of businesses adopting a multi-cloud approach. 
• Machine learning infrastructure company Pinecone Systems is on AWS Marketplace (as well as hairy chest Google), allowing users to easily build advanced AI applications. 
• LYTT, which is not a company that is perpetually high but one that has a real-time sensor analytics platform, has partnered with AWS to roll doobs get more business. 
• Cox Communications has acquired IT service management company Logicworks to help its customers better migrate and manage systems in both Azure and AWS.  
• Automated cloud migration company Next Pathway has also added its SHIFT Cloud SaaS offering on Azure Marketplace 
• Electronic component distributor Avnet has debuted its IOTConnect Platform on AWS to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Mmmmm say less. 
• IT giant InfoSys has become an Amazon MSK Delivery Partner. My favorite part about this press release, other than that it ends, is that AWS clearly strong-armed the draft to be about them, not even mentioning Infosys in the body copy until paragraph three.  
• Ansys, a software company, has expanded its partnership with Microsoft to increase availability of its simulation solutions in Azure.  
• Sway AI, which makes low- and no-code AI solutions, has joined the AWS Partner Network. 
• SoftServe has earned an AWS Service Delivery designation for AWS Graviton.  

New stuff  

• Microsoft Teams Premium is now available. Powered by GPT-3.5 (GREAT!) it can “make meetings more intelligent” which means it will light itself on fire in any meeting that involves the MyPillow guy. 
• Microsoft hopes to boost Viva Sales by shoving GPT in it. Sellers can now ask GPT to generate sales emails, proposals, and more. Can’t wait to see that go south. “Excuse me but I just received an email from one of your employees calling me a mother crappin’ capper, can you please explain this?” “Oh, sure we can. See, we want your money, but you’re not actually worth taking the time to write a few sentences ourselves, so we had the machine do it.” 
• Microsoft has announced Azure Durable Functions support for new storage providers, which means developers can write “long-running, reliable, event-driven, and stateful logic on the serverless Azure Functions platform.” Raise your hand if you care. No? Nobody? That’s what I thought. 
• Microsoft and Adobe are integrating the Adobe Acrobat PDF rendering engine directly into the Edge browser. This will enable more accurate colors and graphics, improve performance, yadda yadda. 

Miscellany 

• Azure has laid off 150 Azure sales staff. 

By Forsyth Alexander

Image by Thad Allen

“Let’s focus on the gaming chair in this animation. Let’s give it wings. Or, wait, let’s show it supported by a strong security posture and low latency! Or maybe we can make it wobble and fix itself…” and off she goes, in search of the perfect idea for the perfect script. 

This is Richa Dubey, former school-aged newspaper titan and grown-up entrepreneur—and current 2A storyteller. And it’s just one example of how she brings light, charm, wit, and knowledge to all kinds of marketing content. 

Do you need a snappy headline? She’s on it. Would some rhymes spruce up your blog? She’s your poet in residence. Do you want an eBook that speaks to a skeptical, tech-savvy audience? Go find Richa—she’ll make them all believers. Writing creative and convincing content is in her blood. 

“I think I’ve always been a writer.” 

Richa can’t really remember a time when she wasn’t a writer. Growing up with a father in the Indian army, she moved more times as a child than many of us do in a lifetime. This honed her ability not only to communicate but also to tell stories—some of which she sold to the army base weekly for pocket money when she was a child. 

As an adult, she learned that it was important to her to be her authentic, original self, while doing what she loved. So, she launched headfirst into being a writer. She perfected her talent as a journalist, publicist, social advocate, magazine publisher, media professional, and more. A lot of this work involved the Indian fashion world.

Because I’m fascinated with world fashion, I asked her what that was like. “It was grueling,” she said. But she also told me it gave her a lifetime’s worth of appreciation for the designs in the beautiful textiles woven in her beloved homeland of India. “Paisley! Oh, I could rapturize for days about Paisley!” she added. 

From India to the U.S.: A “never met a stranger” in a strange land 

In 2015, Richa and her family embarked on her latest adventure: a move to the U.S. It wasn’t long before she had set up a business—in her very own “she shed.”  

Richa “never met a stranger”—which is what we in the southern U.S. states say about someone who is friendly with everyone—so she quickly embraced her new home and its citizens. She made friends, carved out a space for herself in the Seattle area, and dedicated countless hours to advocating for the rights of marginalized humans to be heard.  

From blog posts to Bollywood  

Now, more than seven years later, her shed is a modern-day writer’s bungalow. This is where you can find her virtually penning all kinds of content, like case studies about Nasdaq and eBooks that squeeze information about 20 brands in just a few pages. You might also catch her leading a Bollywood dance session for 2A employees. 

Outside her bungalow, she attends karate lessons, participates in community affairs, takes care of her family, and tries as many new experiences as she can. 

“I’m determined to do things people don’t think I should. It’s why I took up scuba diving a few years ago. Sky diving’s next,” she confided. 

It’s all one magnificent textile threaded with gold, storytelling, and passion—it’s the Richa tapestry of life. 

By Nora Bright

Image by Thad Allen

We know our people are what make 2A special—so we take hiring seriously. For the marketing agency, we need folks who can understand complex technology AND craft beautiful prose or designs. For our Embedded Consultants, our clients are often seeking a specific skillset that takes some serious 2A elbow-grease to find. On top of that, we’re always looking to build a stronger and more diverse team by hiring individuals who bring new perspectives and come from different backgrounds. 

Last year we decided to research the latest and greatest strategies for writing job descriptions that attract a diverse talent pool—and see how we could take our own job postings to the next level. Read on for our top 3 tips. You may discover something new! 

Use growth mindset language 

Fascinating research shows job descriptions that use growth mindset language instead of fixed mindset language are twice as likely to result in a woman being hired. What’s a growth mindset? It’s a term coined by Carol Dweck that describes the belief that if you work hard, you can grow your talents. Language like “hard-working,” “curiosity” or “thoughtful” reflects that. 

The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset—the perspective that talent is something you’re born with (or not). Examples of fixed mindset language would be “genius” or “super star.” Words like this can make candidates decide not to apply for the role at all, because they don’t feel like they’ve got it all figured out yet (who does?). 

At 2A, we hold growth mindset ideals close to our hearts but realized our job descriptions had plenty of fixed mindset words. We combed through our job descriptions and changed phrases like “expert” to “passionate.” We love that our job descriptions better reflect our values. 

Cool it on the requirements 

You need someone who can write a 500-word blog article in under 20 minutes—while juggling a litter of kittens? We’ve all read job descriptions with requirements that seem to target someone who doesn’t really exist (we’ve got a phrase for that in recruiting, unicorn candidates.) Not only are these job descriptions unrealistic, but they can also scare people off from applying who don’t meet every single bullet. We know from research that women are less likely to apply if they don’t meet all the requirements in a job description. 

Instead of wish list of every attribute, we culled our requirements to a concise list of skills and experiences that are essential for getting the job done. 

If you’ve got it, flaunt it (great benefits, that is) 

Benefits like parental leave and health insurance are an important way that companies care for their employees. Including your benefits in a job description is a great way to help candidates from different backgrounds see themselves thriving personally and professionally at your company.  

We have pretty sweet benefits here at 2A. In addition to great health, dental, and vision insurance, plus a generous PTO plan, we also have an enrichment stipend, donation matching, and more. Where were these benefits in our job descriptions? Nowhere, and candidates needed to click a few times to find any information about them. Now our benefits are easy to find along with the role’s salary range. 

So, are you ready to see what it looks like when growth mindset language, concise requirements, and show-stopping benefits come together? Check out our careers page! 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Evan Aeschlimann

World domination 

• Time for the AWS world tour because the company is ALL OVER THE MAP this month. 
• The tech giant is investing an “extra” $35B (that’s billion not million) in its #1 geographical hub, Virginia. The investments follow promised incentives from the state of Virginia, which claims big-eared bats as its state animal and milk as its official state drink. The incentive? An endless supply of milk from the teats of big-eared bats. LUCKY. #bigearedbatcheese #bigearedbatbutter 
• AWS has opened its second Australia Region in Melbourne. The toilets at this data center flush in the opposite direction of ours, and that’s true! 
• Side note: For shits and giggles I asked ChatGPT to write a joke pertaining to this news and it produced, “Why did the data center move to Australia? To get a tan!” Toilets are better. 
• And more Brazilians are using AWS Cloud. AWS was so happy about this that they issued a press release to let everyone know. 
• Australia just won’t quit—AWS has launched a Local Zone in Perth, aka the birthplace of my late husband Heath Ledger. AWS has also opened Local Zones in Santiago, Chile; Lima, Peru; and Lagos, Nigeria—with plans to open “hundreds of edge zones” in the future. 
• I’m not done. AWS has filed for three more data centers in Dublin. It’s been almost 20 years since I decided to get on top of a bar there and pretend to Irish dance before falling to the ground ::forever cringing:: so pretty sure it’s safe for me to go back now, should AWS need 2A assistance. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft stock was downgraded following a disappointing quarterly earnings call—but the good news is that Azure saved the day with a decent 18% YoY growth. But let me snap that joy back with the fact that Microsoft says it expects decelerated sales next quarter. And Microsoft isn’t alone; it can cry in the corner with Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple, the other biggest market value losers. 
• Also, the line at Starbucks Bellevue is going to get a lot shorter now that Microsoft is pulling out of office space. 
• A week earlier, Microsoft laid off 10,000 ‘softies, which include some Azure staff…thanks for nothing, I guess. It will cost $1.2B to part ways with all of them. Does somebody at Microsoft need a new calculator or something? 
• After announcing its own layoffs, AWS plans to cut some of 100+ “disjointed” partner benefits. “New partners will only get one cup of welcome Jell-O, as opposed to three,” said a spokesperson. “And they will all be cherry, no more lime. It’s gotten too complicated.” We’ll find out more in April when they announce the changes.  
• It took all my willpower not to put this news item first: Congress has told the Army to stop buying Microsoft’s shitty war googles. The military asked for $400M to buy 6,900 virtual reality pieces of plastic—that’s after the $40M they spent fixing the flawed models. “Sorry,” said an Army general who asked to remain anonymous. “Someone at Microsoft gave me this calculator, and I guess it doesn’t work.”   
• Outlook and Teams were down for hundreds of users on January 25, making headlines. Workers everywhere faked disappointment and frustration. 
• “Don’t let them sue us!” Microsoft et al begged the government. Human rights groups (who needs them?) says that AI algorithms could do some real damage and that the government should remove big tech’s liability shield. But companies like Meta, who only want the very best for everyone, said that would change the entire nature of the internet and THEN how are incels supposed to find their ilk on Reddit?? 
• The VP of Teams has left for Google, working on apps at Google Workspace, because she loves misery. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Cloudflare is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to include a new set of integrations that help organizations achieve a Zero Trust model, otherwise known as moving all food as far away from the dogs as possible every time I leave the kitchen.  
• Oxymoron-ish company New Relic announced the release of its Azure native New Relic service on Azure Marketplace. And, Couchbase has made its managed Capella database available on Azure. 
• SAP and AWS had already teamed up to help customers achieve complex cloud migrations. The partnership now extends to joint marketing efforts such as demand gen campaigns. ::raises hand for a long time and has to prop it up with other hand until picked:: 
• In partnership with Avalanche’s Ava Labs, AWS wants to help companies scale blockchain adoption. AWS will support Avalanche’s infrastructure and decentralized application (dApp) ecosystem, alongside one-click node deployments, through its marketplace. 
• On the AI front, customer service automation company Ada is now available on AWS Marketplace, as is One AI, a platform that enables developers to add language AI to products and services. 
• Celerium (which is not a store that sells celery and celery only, but a cybersecurity firm) just joined the AWS Public Sector Partner Program following its completion of the AWS Foundational Technical Review.  
• Data management company Denodo earned the AWS Data and Analytics ISV Competency status and network-as-a-service provider Megaport earned an AWS Outposts Ready Partner designation, part of the AWS Service Ready Program. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Financial services firm Suncorp Group signed a three-year deal with Microsoft to move 90% of its data to the cloud by the end of this year.  
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is revving up its healthcare strategy—more specifically, the digitization of pathology—as signaled by a recent partnership with AI company Paige.   
• For a company that’s all over the map, it’s a good thing AWS is investing in maps. Building on recent maps news, AWS has added Singapore’s GrabMaps as an option for its Amazon Location Service, allowing developers to add geospatial functionality to apps. AWS is also collaborating with HERE Technologies so that third-party AWS developers can track and manage IoT devices. 
• Some of our storytellers pointed out that sustainability was a big AWS theme going into 2023, and the plan is coming to life: the cloud provider will build all these new zones, regions, and data centers in partnership with sustainable building providers. This includes using ECOpact concrete, a low-carbon cement. Sounds like a…solid plan. 🥁 
• AND Microsoft is investing in Boston Metal, a company born from MIT that has developed a new way of making clean steel, the newest Zoolander look. 

New stuff  

• While it asks for free reign of AI without consequence, Microsoft decided it would be a good time to reveal an AI tool that can mimic your voice perfectly using just three seconds of audio. Stuff like this is already being used to fake kidnappings to gather ransom from families, but hey, it has really low carbon emissions.  
• More AI: Microsoft has made Azure OpenAI Service generally available, which includes the latest version of ChatGPT as well as Dall-E 2. 
• When this world gets you down, AWS wants you to be able to explore another one—which you can do with SimSpace Weaver, a solution that manages real-time spatial simulations across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. An analyst says this is all part of the AWS plan to be the cloud provider of choice for spatial computing. 
• AWS announced a different type of mapping: one for AWS Step Functions, which will help customers navigate large-scale data processing. And the new Amazon OpenSearch Serverless lets users run managed search and analytics workloads.  
• Now anyone can subscribe to a basic tier for Microsoft 365. If a female dog signed up for this tier it could literally be a basic bitch. 
• We can now all enjoy the new integration with Appspace, which claims to extend Teams capabilities, but the article didn’t give too much info as to how. Turns out someone from Appspace just sits behind you with a paddle and screams MORE PRODUCTIVITY. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• In keeping with its job of throwing the world’s largest tech companies under the bus, Orca Security found four significant vulnerabilities in Azure services—luckily, before hackers did. Microsoft claims they were low risk but given that Microsoft actually fixed them, and fixed them fast, is sus. 
• But let’s be real, Microsoft loves itself some unpatched chaos. Months after the NSA and the UK National Cyber Security Center reported a global Microsoft datacenter vulnerability stemming from a security API, nothing has been fixed. This article then proceeds to tell the world how a hacker can exploit the vulnerability, which is a great idea. Thanks.  
• AWS patched a vulnerability that was found in an API for the popular security tool AWS CloudTrail. Because what is life without some irony sprinkled in? 

Miscellany 

• Microsoft is beating AWS’ ass in emissions tracking so badly that it’s leading some companies to consider moving over to Azure. Microsoft’s API that shows the emissions associated with customers’ Azure services has shown to be far more effective at gauging carbon emissions, both direct and indirect. Studies show what AWS offers is too high level and uses fractured data. 
• Amazon has opened AWS Machine Learning University for free to HBCUs. The hope is that this “educator enablement bootcamp” will bridge the gap of opportunity for those underrepresented in tech.  

By Richa Dubey

Image by Brandon Conboy

When Sanaz is in a meeting, it’s quite simply brighter. Brimming with energy, enthusiasm, and a willingness to jump in and make mistakes, Sanaz, in her own words, is “not afraid to experiment” if it means she’ll learn or contribute to the process.

“Sanaz” means grace in Persian, which is fitting, because she rarely messes up. She’s a great consultant who fields tight deadlines and busy schedules, then delivers what clients need and want.

Sanaz regularly whips up fabulous Persian meals for her family and shepherds three teenagers through everything (including setting up their own nonprofit that was featured on the local news). Then she hits the gym. She’s a pro at juggling a busy life and multiple projects all at once.

Insert classic question that successful women professionals get asked: How do you do it all? “I am a bundle of energy, and any physical activity—cue skiing, walking the dog—helps.”

After a decade of teaching middle- and high-schoolers math and science she quit because of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I missed the human connection and couldn’t handle remote teaching.” 

Sanaz then took a leap of faith and switched to a project management role at a telecommunications consultancy. She ended up being so good at it that she went from being a project manager to VP in under a year. But this is Sanaz we’re talking about, and she wanted to learn more, “I was at the level of a VP, running the company alongside the president, but felt I could grow so much more. What I needed was to move on and be better so when I met a friend (at the gym, of course) who works at Microsoft, and she recommended I try technology marketing, I jumped at it.” 

The rest, as they say, is history—just like her brush with the Iranian morality police in her youth. 

The first time Sanaz had a run-in with the morality police, she was barely 15 and not wearing the “right kind” of hijab. Picked up from her neighborhood and dumped in the back of a van along with her friends and cousin, she was luckily able to attract the attention of her parents who were just outside and got off with a warning and having to write a promissory note. 

But we carry our history with us, and Sanaz remains an outspoken advocate for gender equity in Iran besides actively volunteering in her local community. No surprises there, because beyond being all brain, this former biomedical engineering PhD candidate is also full of heart, fun, bravery, empathy, and always… grace.  

By BB Bickel, Richa Dubey, Mai Sennaar

Image by Thad Allen

A new year always presages new trends and developments in the constantly fluctuating world of technology. Since technology is part of 2A’s DNA, it’s only natural that we’d pick out a few trends to highlight. Three notable movements stand out to us, which were backed up by their featured prominence at the latest AWS re:Invent conference. They are:

• Innovation can be experimental and disruptive
• Responsibility and bias mitigation in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
• Sustainable and renewable technologies

Solutions arise from falling in love with the problem, not the product

Technology companies are making high-quality, high-velocity decisions. The outstanding ones remain stubborn on vision and flexible on details. Those that focus on building features customers will love, whether or not it’s the easiest feature to make, will succeed. Experimentation is the holy grail this year, with the goal of being bold and disruptive while innovating. True innovation is agreeing first on what the customer would love, and then developing a product to address that desire (or need), not the other way around.

Innovation also involves a bias for action, with blessings to move ahead with 70 percent of the data. This goes back to the roots of AWS. As Jeff Bezos said in his 2015 letter to shareholders, “…failure and invention are inseparable twins…Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten…Big winners pay for so many experiments.”

Thus, if technology companies are going to win big, they’re going to fail big too. They will walk through the door and close it behind them. It’s all part of the process. They will constantly reinvent themselves by keeping the dynamism of Day 1 and consider a Day 2 mentality as stasis.

Responsibility in AI and ML

Diversity brings more perspectives to the table and is therefore critical to building responsible and inclusive AI and ML. Only with truly diverse teams can a company mitigate bias in their algorithms. People are at the center of these technologies and drive the decisions; machines only make recommendations.

People-centric design has become a different model for AI, as it considers others and seeks out not only explicit but implicit bias. Today, leadership places emphasis on helping engineers develop the right skills so that fairness, integrity, and dignity become part of AI’s DNA. In fact, in December, Amazon’s Machine Learning University launched a new course, “Responsible AI—Bias Mitigation & Fairness Criteria.” It is an entry-level course for technical individuals and explains where bias in AI systems comes from, how to measure it, and ultimately how to mitigate bias as much as possible. Since AI and machine learning touch so many aspects of peoples’ lives, it’s crucial to build trust and prevent disadvantages among subgroups of customers.

Sustainability

Sustainability could conceivably be the most important word in our world today. The statistics on climate change are horrific and only a focus on sustainability and renewable energy will make a dent. Thankfully, wind and solar energy technologies are growing at an unprecedented rate, and there is a greater interdependence between gas and electricity. According to Gartner, 80 percent of CEOs who plan to invest in new or improved products in the coming year cited environmental sustainability as the third largest driver, making it a competitive differentiator.

Among the cloud providers, AWS has done the lion’s share of work toward sustainability. The company’s mandate is to achieve net zero carbon by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Climate Accords, and it is working toward 80 percent renewable energy by 2024. Amazon buys more renewable energy than any other corporate buyer on the planet. In addition, Amazon has already invested $2 billion in clean technology.

As we kick off the third year of what has been the most unpredictable decade of the 21^st century, here’s to making disruption work for us—and our planet.