Ron Miller

Hi everyone. We are making our way more firmly into fall here in New England with crisp cold nights, warm days and the ground full of fallen leaves crunching underfoot. Just a reminder if you're interested in having me moderate a panel or fireside or produce a sponsored video for your event, please drop me a line at ron@fastforward.blog. If you like what you see, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔

For a company that put the brakes on acquisitions just a few years ago in the face of activist investor pressure, Salesforce has been pretty busy lately making deals. Since the beginning of 2025, it has announced plans to buy 18 companies. That's a lot of M&A action. The latest is this week's proposed $5.7 billion purchase of customer engagement platform Braze, bringing the disclosed value of its acquisitions over that period to approximately $22 billion. And that doesn't include several deals

When you're the chief data officer at an insurance company that's more than 150 years old and primarily serves businesses, you have to figure out how to make AI work while dealing with legacy systems that can be expensive to change. For CDO Kristen Bessette, it also means understanding that the basics still matter, especially in the age of AI. At an insurance company, you need to consider governance, security and privacy. You have to figure out which systems to modernize, which data to get read

The news is full of agentic horror stories, of escaping sandboxes, and finding ways around guardrails. This is raising a persistent worry among security professionals: As agents proliferate in the enterprise, companies are struggling to find ways to keep them under control. Even as this is happening, they also need to give the agents context to understand the business requirements and how to act on behalf of the business in a way that makes sense. Egnyte, a company that focuses on working with

When I was at SailPoint Navigate earlier this month I learned a lot about the importance of identity in controlling agents. Agents have the unique ability to take on different identities as they move through a complex process and encounter other systems and agents, each with a different set of permission requirements. ServiceNow announced a new tool last week to help called AI Passport that could work with SailPoint or any other identity vendor (or governance or enforcement mechanism for that m

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced Headless 360, its way of providing back-end access to the data on the platform without requiring a front-end. The company reiterated this position at Dreamforce last month. I wrote about it here and here. But Salesforce is not alone in recognizing that the value of SaaS does not lie in the interface, but in the data being collected on the platform. Agents don't necessarily need an interface the way we do, and headless separates the two. This week, at Wor

Hi everyone. The colors are bursting outside my window as it's fall in its full glory in New England. Just a reminder if you're interested in having me moderate a panel or fireside or produce a sponsored video for your event, please drop me a line at ron@fastforward.blog. If you like what you see, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 My adventures in AI Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn know

Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn know I report regularly about my tempestuous relationship with AI under the title 'My adventures in AI.' I have dabbled, struggled, experimented, raged and eventually found a somewhat peaceful way to coexist with these tools as I incorporate them into my daily work routines. They help me with research, editing, creating business documents and other tasks that in many ways help me as a solo practitioner, and sometimes hinder, depending on the day. Trust me

With over 30 years of IT experience, Qualcomm CIO Atilla Tinic has seen a few shifts in his time. But like many executives and analysts I’ve spoken with recently, he says AI is changing how he manages IT more significantly than anything that came before it. By now, we know all too well that a model is only as good as the data it was trained on. At Dreamforce last month, Salesforce executives went so far as to say that the company's data is much more important than the interface, and that perhap

Hi everyone. I spent the first part of this week at the SailPoint Navigate conference in Austin where I learned loads about identity and agentic AI, and I made a sponsored video with the EVP of products and CTO Chandra Gnanasambandam. If you're interested in having me moderate a panel or fireside or produce a sponsored video for your event, please drop me a line at ron@fastforward.blog. If you like what you see, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It

Disclosure: I was paid by SailPoint for moderation and video work at its Navigate conference. The company had no input into this commentary, which follows my editorial guidelines. I was in Austin this week at SailPoint Navigate learning a lot about the role of identity in agentic AI, and Austin felt like a particularly apt place to be, a booming city with a distinct high tech flavor. As I  strolled the streets in the city center, I couldn’t help but notice all the self-driving Waymos, Teslas an

Imagine you're a manager who has a tough conversation with an employee coming up. You're not great at confrontation and you have to tell this person that they're not getting the promotion they've been angling for. How do you practice such a conversation in a safe way? One way might be with an AI avatar. Yes, an avatar. At least, that's the vision that Synthesia, a British AI startup, is trying to sell with a new product called Roleplay Sessions, which it released last week. The company has been

Hi everyone. Can't believe it's fall and the leaves are starting to turn outside my office window already. I’d like to thank Akamai once again for supporting FastForward for the last four issues. If you're interested in advertising, please drop me a line at ads@fastforward.blog. If you like what you see, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 AI still has a major trust problem But something is happ

But something is happening here And you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones ~ Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man This week, OpenAI and Meta released competing versions of a new kind of persistent agent for business. To work well, each needs sweeping access to your company's data. And that's the rub, isn't it? Both companies have a major credibility problem. The more sophisticated these tools become, the more access they require. The question is whether individuals and businesses are willing t

There is an expectation out there, due in large part to the hype around AI, that companies are rolling it out widely and seeing meaningful results. Yet research suggests that most organizations still struggle to scale AI projects beyond pockets of success. At a panel at HumanX in Amsterdam last week, called Building for the AI Era, I spoke with Avani Prabhakar, chief people and AI enablement officer at Atlassian and Chris Burgess, global VP of technology and deputy CIO at Expedia. The two compa

When Glasswing Ventures' co-founder and managing partner Rudina Seseri appeared at a TechCrunch Early Stage event in Boston in 2024, she already recognized that AI was changing the way firms like hers invest, and what they looked for in a company. The old SaaS playbook was breaking down. You couldn't take an existing product, put a thin AI wrapper around it, add a call to a frontier model, and call it a pivot. The AI world has come a long way since that appearance, and Seseri's investing philos

Harness isn't just a company creating tools to help developers ship code faster and safer, it's also creating software itself, and AI coding is changing the way it thinks about product roadmaps as a concept. Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of the company, appeared recently on the FastForward on PPN podcast, and he discussed how much AI has changed the business of building and selling software. "We did an estimate for our team and we are shipping a big feature every 11 hours right now. I could no

Adobe announced its new CEO earlier this month, Anil Chakravarthy, who came from the enterprise side of the house where he served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration business.  At the beginning of the summer, I spoke to Amit Ahuja, Adobe's SVP of CX products, to learn about the company's approach to AI, especially in its enterprise business. While long-time chief exec Shantanu Narayen announced he was stepping down last March after 18 years on the job to become executive c

While the AI labs were sending out scary pronouncements and talking about slowing the pace of frontier development, Salesforce was holding its annual customer carnival in San Francisco this week, giving its customers a very different message.  Benioff and friends weren’t there to discuss how AI could potentially wipe out humanity. They were more interested in how AI could wipe out the user interface as we’ve known it.  Of course, there was pageantry aplenty at the Dreamforce keynote on Tuesday

Hi everyone. I’d like to thank Akamai once again for supporting FastForward for the month of September. If you're interested in advertising, please drop me a line at ads@fastforward.blog. If you like what you see, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 The end of the user interface While the AI labs were sending out scary pronouncements and talking about slowing the pace of frontier development, Sa