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

Visa faces a monumental battle when it comes to fighting fraud, and the volume it deals with is staggering. The company handled 257.5 billion transactions and processed more than $14 trillion in payments last year. AI is only exacerbating the problem by giving scammers more sophisticated ways to fool consumers. Consider that last year, for the period July through December, the company identified nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity. Sure, that's a lot of money, but when you compare it wit

When Harness launched in 2017, it was a different world. Developers wrote code in those days and Harness was designed from the beginning to help build, test and release that code faster. While it's still focused on that, AI agents are producing more code much faster and the company has had to adjust to that shift. Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of the company, appeared recently on the FastForward on PPN podcast, and he discussed how much the company has changed since those early days and how muc

Here we go again. Another AI researcher emerged this week warning us of humanity's impending doom due to the power of AI. This one was a former Anthropic employee who quit his job because he is convinced these models are going to kill us all. I thought we were past the doom-speak, but apparently not. Alongside these types of pronouncements, which we have been hearing on a regular basis since ChatGPT emerged in 2022, there is a charged language developing around describing this generation's AI c

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 language we use to describe AI matters Here we go again. Another AI researcher emerged this week warning us of humanity's impending doom due to

In 2020, IBM announced it was spinning out its managed infrastructure services division as an entirely independent business. It would require essentially building a company from the ground up with everything from a new network to a new security posture to physical badges to get into the building. Yet it wasn't really starting from scratch. Kyndryl was the size of a full-blown company, and it had data and applications and a stack of legacy technology that it had built up over time as part of IBM

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in FastForward #78 in the News of the week section. It is presented here in its entirety with light editing. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. In its most recent quarter, it reported revenue of over $96 billion, up 106% YoY. With cash on hand over $22 billion and a market cap of $5.4 trillion, it has the financial flexibility to do just about whatever it wants. Rumors have been flying for some time that what Nvidia wanted was Huggi

I had my first appointment with a new dentist this week and I noticed the shiny new modern equipment my previous dentist lacked. There was X-ray film that fit better in my mouth and a portable machine so the technician didn't have to move the heavy, awkward arm. There was a sonic cleaner that pumped air and water through as the hygienist cleaned my teeth.  There was even a TV on the ceiling running a loop of ocean life scenes (which was surprisingly soothing) and an electric train that cycled t

Hi everyone. Welcome to our first September issue. Before we jump into this week’s newsletter, I’d like to thank Akamai for supporting FastForward as its very first sponsor. If you're interested in advertising here, 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 AI revolution hasn't reached small business I had my first appointmen

Cisco acquires a lot of startups as part of its overall acquisition strategy. One of the issues any large company faces when buying younger companies is how to preserve the core innovation that makes that company worth buying in the first place. During our interview on FastForward on PPN last month, Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel talked about his approach. Patel says as he looks at how to bring acquired companies into the fold, he is fully aware that he can't let the big