By Scott Knackstedt

Katy loves to make things grow. Her community pea-patch is chock-full of tomatoes, beans and berries. An avid apiarist, she’s worked hard to keep the bees that zip above the groundcover – and pollinate her crops – happy. In addition to her squash and sunflowers, Katy and her cheery, can-do attitude have been key to growing our storytelling practice here at 2A. A Connecticut native with green thumbs and a journalist’s eyes, she has jumped feet-first into delivering exceptional work for clients – and making our community better along the way.

She’s got the write stuff

We love words at 2A, and bringing someone with Katy’s penchant for wordsmithing onto the team was a no-brainer. She has worked as a feature reporter, a freelance writer, and a communications associate, penning pieces for newspapers, magazines, and policy briefs. At 2A she has leveraged these reporting chops toward qualitative research, asking probing questions to find nuggets of insight. She’s crafted taglines, constructed copy, and created stories for companies large and small. She relishes the challenge of keeping words intentional and we’re lucky for it.

She puts the hive first

Katy has a passion for community, and has worked with non-profits, schools, and local government to make her city a better place to live. She has helped install permaculture gardens in rural communities, promoted urban hives as the executive director of DC Honeybees, and volunteered as a bee educator at The Smithsonian. She has shown her support for Seattle Pride, participated in SIFF, and helped reduce traffic as a bike commuter. This community-first attitude translates into a collaborative and open approach to problem solving. Listening with a critical ear and not afraid to ask the tough questions, she ensures that team projects with broad stakeholders can find success, getting to the crux of the challenge and acting in everyone’s best interest.

She brings a new perspective

We appreciate the diversity of industries that our team has had exposure to, and Katy’s previous projects with urban planning, non-profits, and international development are no exception. She has studied in Paris, taught in Peru, and worked in Colombia. With her knack for language that makes sure nothing gets lost in translation, she is a natural fit for projects with global teams and cross-continent coordination.

Sowing seeds and providing pollinators have their rewards for gardening, but Katy loves it best when she can pick the fruits of her labor and cook up a tasty meal. She brings a lot to the table at 2A and we – and our clients – are lucky she’s decided to put down roots here. She may be as busy as a bee when leading projects, but seeing them grow into top-tier deliverables is, well, sweeter than honey.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• “Stop drinking Cokes, Jane,” they say…but how can I when Microsoft has entered the chat? Coca-Cola signed a $1B, five-year deal (partially funded by me) to use Microsoft’s cloud computing and AI services. “But how can this poisonous drink get any better?” you may ask. Don’t worry, the amazing taste that lights up your entire brain and sends your pancreas into a tailspin won’t change—they’ll just be summarizing emails and whatnot. 
• Telefonica Germany is moving one million 5G customers to AWS. This is the first time an existing mobile operation has switched its core network to a public cloud. I bet the AWS person who led that deal gets drunk at bars and screams at locals, “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I AM? I GOT THE TELEFONICA DEAL…IT’S THE FIRST…YOU PEOPLE DON’T KNOW…you don’t know….” ::sobs into melty gin and tonic:: 
• And what timing: AWS signed a multi-year deal with Mavenir—a cloud-native network infrastructure provider for networks—“to create a new telco-grade deployment model.” I still miss the good old days of Bananaphone. (Tell me that won’t be in your head for the next week.) 
• Like AWS, Microsoft is going heavy on industry. It recently developed copilot templates, integrations, and capabilities for areas such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and energy. Several industry players have announced deals this past month: Anglian Water in the UK is moving several workloads to Azure; Hexagon, a German manufacturing intelligence company, is rolling out applications using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service; and UK electrical retailer Currys is moving to Azure. 
• In an article written by a journalist who ignored 50 out of my 50 pitches while I worked in the depraved world of PR, we learn that News Corp has made a deal worth $250M with OpenAI. Per the five-year agreement, ChatGPT will use content from the empire that brought us Alex Jones. Reddit has a similar deal with ChatGPT, so fasten your seatbelts! 
• Bright Machines, a software and robotics company serving the manufacturing industry, is collaborating with Microsoft to create a software-defined manufacturing environment that spans the entire manufacturing lifecycle. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about this and I got: It’s like giving your factory a software upgrade—now it can finally stop asking for a break every five minutes! 👀👀👀 
• MongoDB and Microsoft announced an alliance with its MongoDB AI Applications Program, a “one-stop shop” for businesses wanting to build generative AI solutions. 
• Media and technology company Axel Springer is working with Microsoft “to support independent journalism around the world” (sureeeee) through AdTech and other AI-driven experiences for users, once referred to as “readers.” In the meantime, news publishers are concerned that Google’s new AI-powered search will be “catastrophic” to their website traffic. 
• If Broadcom dumped AWS, then AWS is out at the club with IBM taking selfies and posting them on Insta to make Broadcom jealous. The two have taken their relationship to the next level by “streamlining access to AI and hybrid cloud solutions.” How? IBM’s software products will be available in 92 countries through AWS Marketplace. Analysts view this as a “significant development” in the cloud industry. 
• AWS and CrowdStrike are speeding up their cybersecurity consolidation. AWS will integrate CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform for advanced security while CrowdStrike will leverage AI tools from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, to develop generative AI capabilities for its solutions. 

World domination 

• In a huge commitment to France, Microsoft will invest $4.3B in the country’s AI sector (which includes datacenter infrastructure and renewable energy). The goal is to attract foreign investment and establish an AI skilling initiative to train one million French peeps by the end of 2025. 
• Coming to Germany by 2025: an AWS “sovereign cloud,” which will be “physically and logically separate” from AWS regions. This will help AWS customers meet the country’s comparably stricter data-residency requirements, and hopefully persuade reluctant public agencies to move to the cloud. 
• When I visited Wisconsin, the best thing I saw was Katy Nally. The second-best thing I saw was a 12-person, 5-foot-tall beer bong, followed by a 50-pound cheese wheel. I guess Microsoft realized these advantages when it decided to invest $3.3B in a regional cloud-computing and AI hub (ChatGPT, show me how to set up this bong. Include the number of beers I’ll need to fill it.). Some money will also go to a manufacturing-focused AI Co-Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. 
• Microsoft is collecting datacenters like Pokémon cards. In a continued spending spree/unhinged datacenter obsession, Microsoft purchased more land outside Columbus, OH; is launching an Azure cloud region in Queretaro, Mexico; and is opening Thailand’s first regional datacenter. (But Microsoft is closing its Africa Development Centre in Lagos…without providing a reason.) 
• Amazon is spending almost $9B to expand its cloud infrastructure in Singapore, part of its larger investment in the Asia-Pacific region. 
• AWS has launched datacenters in Israel and plans to invest $7.2B through 2037. This will allow the Israeli government to migrate workloads to the cloud, run applications, and store data using in-country datacenters. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• After Uncle Sam essentially issued an ultimatum to Microsoft about its AI and cloud-computing base in China, Microsoft has asked nearly 1,000 of its China-based staff, who are largely Chinese engineers, to relocate to the US, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand. Since New Zealand is utopia, I have a plan: My husband and I will stack two-high in a trench coat and then travel to China to romance one of these engineers, who will then marry me (but kind of us; he’ll find out later), and then we can all get New Zealand citizenship! FLAWLESS PLAN. 
• Broadcom, which now owns VMware after a $61B deal, is moving its VMware workloads to Google Cloud—AND decided that it will take over sales of its VMware cloud product on AWS (among other policy changes that make me think Kendall Roy has taken over). This uber pissed off AWS, which sells a VMware Cloud on AWS service. As a result, AWS is incentivizing users of its own VMware Cloud on AWS service to move. This is a juicy drama and something I can get behind. I’m invested in this hot mess, and I’m ready for the next punch to be thrown between these two, because I’m a suburban working mother over 40 and I need this. 
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is also offering incentives to VMware customers that migrate and run their workloads using the Azure VMware Solutions service. 
• Last quarter, Microsoft brought in $26.7B in revenue (from cloud alone). Microsoft saw a 20% rise in share price…before announcing these figures at the earnings call. When you have that much money, you can afford to build a datacenter out of 50-pound cheese wheels. I’m just saying, you know, ideas. 
• On its quarterly earnings call, Amazon announced 17% revenue growth YoY for its cloud unit. 
• Is there…hope? Microsoft banned US police departments from using its Azure OpenAI Service for facial recognition via its terms of service. As someone who lives in a state where face masks could soon be banned in public FOR ANY REASON without exemption, I appreciate this solid, Microsoft. 👊
• Eight newspaper publishers are suing Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement. The papers, which include the Chicago Tribune and the NY Daily News, claim that the tech companies reuse the papers’ articles without permission and incorrectly attribute inaccurate information to them. 
• The Storytelling team at 2A is growing to love Perplexity AI, a search engine that reduces the work of Googling. But Microsoft has banned its employees from using the platform (which also happens to be a huge Azure OpenAI customer). Here’s why. 

New stuff 

• Microsoft launched Phi-3 Mini, the first of three “lightweight” AI models the company plans to release. What makes it teeny? It’s trained on a comparatively smaller data set than its bigger GPT cousin. In this case, it learned from children’s bedtime stories—but hopefully not that creepy one, Love You Forever, where the elderly mother straps a ladder to her car and drives to her fully adult son’s house in the middle of the night so she can climb through his window to cradle him. Anyway, these models are appealing because they’re cheaper to run and perform better on personal devices. Microsoft also released the new iteration of its ChatGPT offering, GPT-4o. It supports text and image, shifting how the model interacts with multimodal inputs. 
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available. In a jargon-ridden post that would endlessly frustrate Forsyth Alexander, AWS announced this game-changing reimagining of the software development lifecycle. Amazon Q in QuickSight is also available and offers generative business-insight capabilities, such as answering questions the dashboard doesn’t explain and generating reports and executive summaries. 
• Don’t forget Amazon Q Business, which helps employees access company data, view summaries, and gain other business information by connecting to enterprise repositories. 
• Google thinks it can get more customers with honey than vinegar, so it has announced that it will support Azure and AWS clouds, letting businesses manage their security solutions across clouds. 
• After partnering with NVIDIA on integrations, the cloud giant is offering customers an AMD alternative for AI chips. AMD and NVIDIA are competitors, and this contentious move from Microsoft resulted from difficult-to-obtain (and costly) GPUs from NVIDIA. Perhaps this chip polyamory will be short lived once Microsoft starts selling its custom Cobalt 100 chips, which it directly compared to AWS Graviton chips. 
• Users can now import their own custom AI models into Amazon Bedrock. It’s only in preview, but tbh, I don’t know anyone who needs this today, so we’re good. 

Professional pivots 

• For no obvious reason (unless I’m dense), AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is leaving AWS and will be replaced by Matt Garman, SVP of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services. And Baskar Sridharan, formerly an engineering VP at Google Cloud, is now VP of AI/ML services and infrastructure at AWS. 
• Jason Taylor went from Meta to Microsoft. As corporate VP and deputy CTO, Taylor is responsible for pushing forward the next set of AI systems. 

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

• Two congressmen on the House Homeland Security Committee have requested Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft, to testify at a public hearing—part of the government’s investigation of historic nation-state attacks. Anyone wanna play a drinking game where you take a shot every time Brad says, “I don’t recall”? (Or do you want to live?) 
• Internally, Microsoft will hold senior leadership accountable for cybersecurity moving forward, tying performance on security milestones to pay. 
• The company just released new Zero Trust guidance for its Department of Defense customers…. Weird, that’s the same amount of trust I have in the DoD! (I was a military wife, so I get a free pass on this statement.) 

Best Friends Forever 

• Siemens has expanded its partnership with Microsoft to make the Siemens Xcelerator as a Service portfolio of industry software available through Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform. 
• Cloud-computing services provider Rackspace Technology’s Foundry for AI has gained several new Microsoft specializations, including Analytics on Azure and AI and Machine Learning. 
• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will work with AWS to offer generative AI solutions to customers. But first, TCS must learn how to do that, LOL. That’s why AWS will help train “25,000 TCS employees [on] the latest cloud and GenAI skills.” 
• Generative AI copilot provider Moveworks has partnered with Microsoft, bringing its copilot to Microsoft Marketplace and integrating with Azure. 
• Platform engineering company Xoriant earned its Analytics on Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization. 
• NVIDIA Healthcare integrated with Amazon SageMaker and AWS ParallelCluster to streamline ML model deployment and management. NVIDIA customers can also access prebuilt pipelines on AWS HealthOmics. (Don’t worry, if you’re a woman, doctors will still just tell you it’s “stress.”😒) 

By Richa Dubey

Image by Julianne Medenblik

“Leveraging best practices for synergistically delivering elasticity across the content value chain to ensure that the asset is delivered to the client as committed priorly”—a gem that popped up in the 2A storytellers chat—makes as much sense as this line from a classic Bollywood film song: “You see, the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the hemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity.”

And that, dear reader, is what we in the trade call a run-on sentence.

Our storyteller team chat is called the Storyteller Shuffle. Here, we dissect sentences, punctuation, usage, style guides, and grammar. We also like our wordplay, so the shuffle often turns into a rumba…

This is where we take a break, have fun, ask for, and receive, unstinting help from each other. Writing can be a solitary activity, which is why the wisdom, support, and camaraderie we find here is so important. The Shuffle is also where we collectively make your asset shine. If you’re wondering at the ‘collectively,’ try proofing an eBook you’ve written without going cross-eyed. You need a fresh pair of eyes.

Holding each other up, learning together, and having fun is at the core of our little group. Witness this (not entirely) imaginary chat: “I’m slammed for capacity. Can anyone help me with this case study?” Katy Nally, Director of Storytelling par excellence, jumps in, “Sure, I’ve only got a million things to do. But I can take this. And let me fix your calendar so that you’re not overloaded.”

Stuck for punctuation? Kimberly Mass generously weighs in on a hot debate about the merits of commas versus em dashes in a sentence.

Looking to sharpen your interview skills? Shadow Mai Sennar who, with her background in theater, exudes calm confidence while drawing out even the most reticent clients.  

Want to keep up with what’s happening with the cloud biggies? Jane Dornemann keeps us in the loop about all things cloud with her tongue-in-cheek newsy blog.

Wondering how to write about a completely new technology? Get a load of BB Bickel’s confident, successful approach.

Need to pin the client down to answer tough questions? See what happens when Editorial Lead, Forsyth Alexander, wields her trademark Southern charm to soften critiques as she reviews a section of Gandalf’s CV.

Description of the battle with the Balrog in Lord of The Rings, The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 5, The White Rider: “I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountainside where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”

Forsyth marks it up and inserts a comment in the Word document: “Your story is utterly gripping! I was wondering, though, can you explain this gap in your resumé?”

As you can see, it falls to us ask the hard questions. You can also count on us to coax answers out of interviewees, keep your head in the cloud (and feet on the ground), and match the perfect storyteller to your project.

We’ll dot your ‘i’s
And cross your ‘t’s
We’re better than fries
We’re the bees’ knees

Your content, we’ll align
And be sure to make it shine
We’re the bounce in basketball
So don’t you wait—just give us a call