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
For a company that put the brakes on acquisitions just a few years ago in the face of activist investor pressure, Salesforce has been pretty busy lately making deals. Since the beginning of 2025, it has announced plans to buy 18 companies. That's a lot of M&
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Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn know I report regularly about my tempestuous relationship with AI under the title 'My adventures in AI.' I have dabbled, struggled, experimented, raged and eventually found a somewhat peaceful way to coexist with these tools as I incorporate them into
Commentary
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Like so many technologies that came before it, it turns out that AI is more complex to implement than we first thought (or at least were led to believe). Survey after survey finds all but a few notable exceptions are stuck in proofs of concept, unable to scale to the
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And every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay I'll be watching you ~Police, Every Breath you Take It's not exactly a secret that as we move around the internet, interact with search engines and seek guidance from AI bots, we spread
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It's been a wacky summer. We've seen the big AI labs watch their models run amok and go off hacking. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg make a lame attempt to write a happy manifesto (clearly with the help of AI) about his vision of our
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I was at a party last weekend and had a couple of conversations with college professors about their use of AI. I was curious how they were dealing with the tools, whether they were embracing them or blocking them. These two were at opposite ends of the spectrum, though interestingly
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For 25 years, Google was a reliable waystation on the way to a website. You entered a few keywords, clicked a link or two and generally found what you wanted. AI search is altering that relationship. And it's not just changing how we search, it's eroding