FastForward #63: The true value of human-to-human connection
Hi everyone. As we turn to May with the flowers blooming and the apple trees in my yard bursting, I've been thinking a lot about the value we humans bring in a world of AI hype. This week, I decided to explore that idea. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward with a friend, it really helps.💌 Sign up here.
ForwardThinking 🤔
The true value of human-to-human connection
One lesson we learned during the pandemic is the value of in-person connections. I was at TechCrunch at the time and like many publications, we tried to keep the conference engine revving with a series of virtual gatherings. Of course, it worked from a content standpoint, but the true benefit of events is not the content (although that obviously is a big part of it), it's the conversations, the connections and the uniquely human moments that can only happen when we are together.
I could write FastForward from the comfort of my home office without ever leaving, but there is so much value in talking to other people. My trips to HumanX this month and CRM Playaz IRL in March have enriched my thinking and my reporting and writing. I probably wouldn't have written my commentary on headless everything if I hadn't had a real-life chat about it first.
At that same event, Esteban Kolsky made an assertion in a presentation that his skills as an analyst could easily be replaced by a model. The idea surprised me so much that I felt I had to say something. Essentially I said that while models can look back at what they've been fed and write reports, they can't do what we were doing in that room -- gather and talk to one another about what we were seeing. When it comes to being an analyst, Kolsky deals with real companies and customers, which are a valuable part of what he does, and it's not anything a bot is capable of doing.
In a podcast after that presentation, my friend Jon Reed, cofounder at diginomica and a fellow IRL attendee, questioned Kolsky about my pushback. He basically agreed but for different reasons. "What we [knowledge workers] provide is that intuition, that innovation, that imagination, that computers don't have.”
In his Rose Colored Glasses podcast this week, long-time content marketing guru (and I say that in the truest sense of the word) Robert Rose made a similar point. "Nobody (should) hire a marketer because they can operate software," he said. "They hire a marketer because they can think — because they have the taste, judgment and audience/market understanding to know which tasks are even worth doing in the first place."
The human touch
The true value of any knowledge worker is not simply information gathering, it's having the judgment to take that information and turn it into something else. Yes, models can do that too, but what they can't do is learn new things on their own.
And this applies to journalists too, albeit in a different way. We too have taste and judgment. We understand what makes a good story and we shouldn't be ceding our valuable intuition and knowledge of whatever beat we cover to a model that is only capable of feeding back what it knows, and is incapable of collecting fresh details.
Consider that if the Watergate scandal happened today, Woodward and Bernstein would still have to perform good, old-fashioned shoe leather journalism to root out the truth and get people to talk to them, even if it meant meeting in a creepy parking garage. That hasn't changed. Having models may have helped them synthesize their notes faster, but AI couldn't tell the story they told because they were out on the streets talking to sources, not regurgitating existing information into a new form.
There may in fact be value in that regurgitation, but let's not kid ourselves that it's the whole game because it's not. While tech bros and mad hatters may try to convince us otherwise, we have imagination and intuition and taste, something a model triggering zeros and ones and looking for the next token simply isn't capable of doing. And I think we can all take heart in that.
~Ron
What's new on the blog 📰
How Google Cloud’s head of startups thinks about building companies in the AI era
Ahead of Google Cloud Next, I interviewed Darren Mowry who runs their global startup program. Mowry has a unique perspective having also worked at AWS and Microsoft in his career.
He says that AI coding has changed the speed at which companies can build, but it hasn't altered the fundamental requirements of building a business.
"There have been moments during the hype cycle where people were saying, let's throw the fundamentals out, but there's always a return to, do you have clarity of vision? Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what problem you're solving, and do you have a pathway to profitability? We always come back to that," he said.
Why AI projects get stuck in testing hell
Enterprises struggling to implement AI, often getting stuck in an endless testing loop. When that happens, you start to lose the very efficiency gains AI was supposed to deliver in the first place. I moderated a panel at HumanX with Prukalpa Sankar, CEO and co-founder at Atlan and Brad Menezes, CEO and co-founder at Superblocks on how a strong governance foundation can get you out of testing hell and into production faster. This story came from that panel.
Google adds agent control layer, and lock-in debate begins
I returned to my tried and true analyst reaction piece and looked at the impact of Google’s expanded Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. I spoke to three analysts to get their take.
A big question involved vendor lock-in and this is where the three had the most differing opinions. Jason Anderson, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy who covers all things cloud and AI, says all platforms are likely to have some bias built in, but sees Google as the most likely to lock in customers at the moment.
"But in terms of 'openness' I'd say that while most of these platforms are biased, Google's may be slightly more so right now," he said.
Why video and images present such a challenge to enterprise AI teams
Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to understanding, managing and processing unstructured data like images, sound and video. One of the problems is that video is just so complex. As Soyoung Lee, co-founder and head of GTM at Twelve Labs pointed out, it's hard for models to process everything that's going on in video content.
"Video is a uniquely human concept, where it's so similar to the real world. It has sound. It has visuals. It has language. You have to understand how things change over time and connect everything to understand the narrative," she said.
An open source project turns 10 and finds itself tailor-made for the agentic AI era
It's not often that you get a full-circle moment in reporting, but today I published an article on the tenth anniversary of the open source Cloud Custodian, a decade after writing about its launch from inside Capital One for TechCrunch.
What's most interesting is that a project launched in 2016 is just as relevant today, and perhaps even more so as AI reshapes the infrastructure landscape.
PagerDuty ditches per-seat pricing as AI rewires its business
When I was at HumanX earlier this month in San Francisco, I sat down with PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada to chat about the changes AI is bringing to her business, including the way the company prices its services.
"We have a customer who says every hour costs them a million dollars during a major incident. And if we can help them compress a major incident from lasting two hours to 20 minutes, that's a massive value. Well, that's a performance-driven use case," she said.
News of the Week 📣
It's back to the bad old days of lawsuits and sniping for Microsoft and Salesforce
This week Salesforce filed suit in London against Microsoft, bringing back bad memories of earlier lawsuits between the two companies in the 2010s. The latest is an ongoing battle over Microsoft bundling Teams with Office, a move that Salesforce claims puts its Slack product at a distinct disadvantage – and it could be right.
Microsoft clapped back though in a statement to Salesforce Ben this week, telling the Salesforce-focused publication that Slack's sales problems during the pandemic were due to an inferior product, rather than any market advantage from bundling Teams with a popular Office suite. Meow!
Regardless, these types of disputes are better off being settled between the companies than in court or the court of public opinion. Sure, it's fun for us as journalists to watch them battle it out, but at the end of the day it's really bad for customers.
I remember back in 2015 when Satya Nadella appeared on stage with Marc Benioff at Dreamforce embarking on a new era of cooperation at the time. The lawsuits were long settled and Satya said this memorable quote, one I have gone back to several times over the years:
“If you look at our industry, how is our industry going to succeed? It’s only going to succeed if we can add value to our customers. Our customers are going to make choices that make the most sense for them, and it’s not going to be homogeneous choices. They are going to use all these different applications and multiple platforms. It is incumbent upon us, especially those of us who are platform vendors to partner broadly to solve real pain points our customers have,” Nadella said.
He was right then and he's right now. Unfortunately we are back to the companies duking it out, which may suggest a deeper market problem for both companies as AI is both a possible threat and a boon to their business models.
Part of this article originally appeared in a LinkedIn post.
AWS has a damn good week with OpenAI partnership and good earnings news
AWS had a heck of a week this week, registering a double win. First, as soon as OpenAI announced it was untangling itself from an agreement to run exclusively on Microsoft Azure, a move that no longer benefited the AI lab, it wasted no time announcing a new agreement with Amazon to run on Amazon Bedrock, the cloud giant's model management system.
While Amazon had managed to work around that with a deal to run stateless OpenAI workloads on their platform, this certainly opens up things for the company and puts it on more even ground than previously when it looked like Microsoft had a leg up due to its exclusive relationship with OpenAI.
Jamin Ball's regular quarterly cloud earnings charts on LinkedIn had a couple of data points that stuck out for me including 28% growth for the quarter on an astonishing $150 billion run rate.
First of all Amazon growth really dropped for a time, down to 12% in mid-2023. A year later Andy Jassy replaced Adam Selipsky as AWS CEO with AWS lifer Matt Garman, and it was a smart move. Garman has led the company to new heights.
You also may recall that two and a half years ago at re:Invent everyone was saying Amazon was chasing Microsoft in AI, including me, but I had the foresight to caution people that it was early and a lot could change. Well guess what, it was early and a lot changed.
Here's what I wrote in my post re:Invent analysis on TechCrunch:
To be clear, being behind, if that’s what’s happening, is not necessarily fatal for Amazon. It has dominated the cloud since it invented the idea in 2006. And the generative AI landscape is still so nascent, and the market is shifting so quickly, that the perception among investors and some in the media, that Microsoft is ahead, could be moot in 12 or 18 months.
My timeframe might have been off a smidgen, but that's exactly what happened.
Part of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
What I'm reading 📚
When AI Goes Really, Really Wrong: How PocketOS Lost All Its Data
~By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, DevOps.com
AI can cost more than human workers now
~By Madison Mills, Axios
Four forces shaping digital media and the leadership this moment demands
~By Michelle Manafy, Digital Content Next
What I'm watching 📺
The Skills Trap: How Marketers Optimize for the Wrong Future
Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute
Look who's talking 👄
"A lot that gets written about the job market these days, and I kind of look at it and I'm like, wow. Maybe it'll take a couple years, but people like me will eventually realize that there are generations of graduates who have now been bestowed with superpowers, who can do everything that we've always wanted to do. They just don't have the experience yet."
~Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler in a recent interview with FastForward (watch for his profile next week).
