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
I watched this week’s unveiling of Google’s latest smart glasses with a sense of déjà vu. I was among the early participants in the Google Glass Explorer program back in 2013, an initial experiment in smart glasses that in hindsight was well ahead of its time. I ended
Commentary
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
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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
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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
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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
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'
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
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
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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
Commentary
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
Commentary
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