Commentary brings you FastForward’s take on the big trends and developments in enterprise tech and innovation — from AI and cloud to security, data and strategy. These pieces go beyond the headlines to unpack what’s happening, why it matters and what it means for leaders and builders in the space.
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
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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
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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
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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
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Well, it's been building up inside of me For, oh, I don't know how long I don't know why, but I keep thinking Something's bound to go wrong ~Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby A backlash against AI has been building
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We’ve all heard the relentless hype around AI agents. They will be so potent they will come for our jobs, our software, our workflows. Agentic workforces will force an all-encompassing overhaul of how we do business. Wall Street has bought into this vision so completely, it is starting to
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As the drama unfolded last week over OpenAI’s sudden partnership with the DoD, the department was also threatening to treat Anthropic as a supply chain risk (a designation that has since been made official). One of the key sticking points was whether these models should be used to conduct
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As the winter snow keeps accumulating in the Northeast and the tech news continues to pile up with it, I thought it would be fun to once again pay homage to Dan Shaughnessy, the long-time sports columnist at the Boston Globe, who regularly writes columns gathering his random thoughts about
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I was at an event recently where I had an interesting discussion with a college dean about preparing young people for the changing world AI is creating. When I asked about his students' interest in AI, he surprised me with his answer: he said they were more concerned about
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Conventional wisdom suggests that using AI tools makes us more productive. Think about it: you've got this bot that can do stuff for you, whether that's writing code, conducting research or editing this commentary. In theory, that should save time and reduce the administrative busy work
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Wall Street has spent the last two weeks in a full-blown panic over SaaS, with public SaaS stocks shedding hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Investors, behaving with their usual pack mentality, have suddenly decided that AI represents an existential threat to the entire SaaS model. It’s not
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When you saw me out your window Singing from the garden Only the beginning I'm only getting started I don't mind the digging Baby, I'll work harder ~Jack Johnson, Washing Dishes Six weeks ago, I announced I was leaving boldstart and taking this blog