Remember Shadow IT? The term emerged around 2010 as cloud and mobile apps proliferated and employees, fed up with clunky enterprise tools, began seeking alternatives they could access on their own. These applications weren't just easy to access, more importantly, they were easy to use. People wanted work
Profiles
We’ve been hearing about “customer experience” for years and how intelligent use of technology can help deliver more personalized, engaging interactions. That’s always been the goal for every brand, but imagine starting with a blank slate, building something from the ground up with the freedom to design the
Commentary
Think back for a moment to the glory days of 2021. We were just emerging from the pandemic. Companies were hiring in droves, valuations were skyrocketing, the stock market was soaring, and mergers and acquisitions were plentiful. Optimism ruled the day. Then came the grim reality of 2022, where suddenly
When Oracle announced that it had landed a major cloud deal last week, it felt like significant news. How could you ignore a deal that was purported to be worth $30 billion a year? It later came out that the buyer turned out to be OpenAI as part of its
Ferrovial, a Spanish conglomerate, is not exactly a household name in the United States, yet it manages highways in Florida and Texas, power plants in Texas, and is behind the construction of the new Terminal One at JFK airport in New York, one of its biggest projects yet. The company
I just came off a two-week vacation, and facing a short week with low attention spans, I decided to try something a little different for this week’s ForwardThinking. Rather than dig deep into something I was thinking about, I would follow in the tradition of Dan Shaughnessy, the long-time
Mastercard is no stranger to massive volumes of structured data, a foundation that has helped make it a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence across its business. Long before generative AI captured corporate attention, Mastercard was leveraging this structured data to apply machine learning to tackle challenges like fraud detection and
Commentary
I write so much about the importance of data in this publication, but that’s because data is the lifeblood of large language models. If data quality is critical to model performance, then the data within your enterprise applications is even more so. It enables companies to build more relevant
Just weeks after Databricks announced its plans to acquire Postgres database startup Neon for roughly $1 billion, cloud data platform rival Snowflake announced an agreement to buy another Postgres startup, Crunchy Data, for $250 million. While Snowflake and Databricks are each acquiring leading open source PostgreSQL providers to expand the
Profiles
Data has always had an enormous amount of importance in business, but with the rise of large language models, it’s become more valuable than ever. For a company like Qualtrics, which lives and dies by the data it collects on behalf of customers, keeping that data safe is the
Headlines blare gloom and doom about the impact of AI on employment and our lives. We hear about layoffs linked directly to AI. We hear about AGI—artificial general intelligence—a term many people use, but few can agree on a definition or a timeline. Simply put, it’s a
Let’s face it, every one of the major enterprise SaaS platforms is making a big play for agentic AI. Even as we struggle to define the notion and find examples of the aspirational vision of software moving intelligently through complex workflows, these companies are working hard to be the