I wouldn’t blame you for being confused about AI’s impact on jobs. One minute, big tech says AI will replace workers; the next, it’s hiring thousands to implement it. So which is it, or could both be true? Let's start with the premise that AI
We hear so much about the impact of AI on jobs, but is AI killing jobs or is the cost of the infrastructure forcing companies to find ways to pay for it? If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward with a friend, it really
In 2024, Chen Goldberg left a prestigious role at Google as GM and VP of engineering for the Kubernetes and serverless portfolio after more than eight years at the company. It took a bold new challenge to compel her to make such a change, and she found it at neocloud
Few tech companies have survived as many platform shifts as IBM, from mainframes to PCs to the cloud, and its next big bets are on AI and quantum computing. Last week, the company held its Think customer conference in Boston, where the message was clear: AI is hard, and IBM
As any sports fan knows, teams thrive when they have players with a variety of experience. Having a pipeline of younger players in various stages of development helps give the team new blood, cheaper talent and a way to transition from older players as they move on or retire. Organizations
I spent the early part of the week in Boston at IBM Think. Boston is a town with a lot of colleges. The talk of AI mixed with upcoming graduations got me thinking about entry level jobs. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward
In the middle of 2023, the cloud market was fading. Companies had tired of big bills and they were looking to cut back on their usage. Amazon, the original cloud infrastructure vendor, was experiencing its lowest growth rates in years, dropping all the way down to 12% YoY in mid-2023.
Twilio was founded in 2008 to solve a telecom problem using software. If developers could tap into communications APIs, they could start creating software that disrupted the biggest telecommunications companies by putting previously expensive and rare capabilities into the hands of just about anyone who knew how to code. With
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
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
Last week, Google held its annual Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas. There were announcements aplenty, from new TPUs to new security and data products, but perhaps the biggest was Google’s expanded Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which the company is positioning as a more complete orchestration and
Much of the world's text-based content has been used to train large language models. There is actually a shortage of available content because LLMs are constantly sucking up the supply, but there is a large untapped supply of unstructured data – sound, video and images. Why aren't
Analysis
As companies struggle to implement AI in the enterprise, one of the things that tends to happen is letting perfect get in the way of good enough. One of the problems of working with AI as an individual, team or a company is that it’s easy to go down
Commentary
Last month I attended the CRM Playaz IRL event in Atlanta, where I had a memorable conversation with Alan Berkson, who runs analyst relations at Contentful, a headless content management company. Headless is simply a term for separating the front end user interface from the back end code. It was
Newsletters
Hi everyone. As agents take center stage (at least in the hype cycle), this week I explore the notion of headless everything. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward with a friend, it really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 Get ready for headless everything
Analysis
Ten years ago, people were just getting comfortable with the cloud, never mind worrying about containing costs, but Capital One decided to open source an internal cost-control project based on policy as code. That project was Cloud Custodian. In April 2016 I wrote the story of that release for TechCrunch.
Profiles
Even if we never reach the mythological one-person $1 billion startup, it's clear that AI coding tools have helped accelerate the software development process, making that part of startup building faster, cheaper and more efficient than ever before. But just because you can code faster, doesn't
Commentary
Investors are a fickle bunch. They just need to hear a whisper of a rumor, or spy a flash of a headline crossing their Bloomberg terminals, and off they go on a hard sell-off, sure that whatever they heard is going to blow up their positions, when it's
Newsletters
Hi everyone, spring finally sprung here this week, and I launched the FastForward on PPN podcast. You can watch the pilot episode here. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward with a friend, it really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 Wall Street keeps falling
Profiles
Last week at HumanX, I heard a lot about AI, some hype, and some more practical, but however it's presented, it's undeniable that AI is driving changes across every company and industry. I spoke to PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, who told me how it’s forcing
Commentary
ForwardThinking 🤔 I spent the first part of the week at HumanX, the AI-focused conference in San Francisco where I moderated a couple of panels, talked to a bunch of smart people and caught up with many old friends. One thing that stuck out, especially on the main stage, was that
![Human[X] logo on blue background on main stage at HumanX conference.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/37/03/370356ed-dc1d-4cfd-956b-ac4fe1e6cfad/content/images/size/w600/2026/04/IMG_2289-2.jpg)
Newsletters
Editor’s Note: I was at HumanX this week, so this is an abbreviated newsletter without the News of the Week section. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at feedback@fastforward.blog. ForwardThinking 🤔 AI hype...AI reality I spent the first part of the week at
Analysis
Enterprises want to love agentic AI, they really do, but three years after ChatGPT blew onto the scene, companies are still struggling to find value. Agents are the latest manifestation of 'describe it and it will come,' yet like all enterprise automation efforts over the last couple of
Commentary
On Tuesday morning, thousands of Oracle employees were sent packing with an email. While there is no great way to conduct a mass layoff, this move felt particularly cold, waking up to an impersonal missive with the line: "We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position." It