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.
A year ago this week, I started my journey at boldstart. I had spent the previous decade at TechCrunch covering enterprise technology, but over time I had begun to grow restless. As I started to look outwardly for a new challenge, I landed on boldstart, but it was not by
As companies rush breathlessly forward to understand and incorporate AI into their organizations, they are often held back by legacy tech. I was thinking about this recently when I saw the news that AOL is ending its dial-up service at the end of September. It's the end
If you were trying to read the AI tea leaves this week, you could be forgiven for having a hard time. There was no shortage of AI-related news and it was a series of increasingly mixed messages. As an example, we had OpenAI announcing $1 billion in revenue in
It turns out that in spite of the hype, most companies are not all in on AI yet. While there’s a huge dose of FOMO out there, the Economist reported this week that just 10% of firms are using AI in a meaningful way (whatever that means). I’ve
When Palo Alto Networks announced it was buying CyberArk on Wednesday for $25 billion, it sent a clear signal that in the age of agents, identity is going to play a huge role, enough for Palo Alto to pay a premium to grab a major player in this space. It
We've been hearing a lot of positivity when it comes to AI in recent years. It’s going to transform business, increase efficiency, lower costs. Every company needs to embrace it. Ignoring it is not an option. Consider these recent quotes from big company CEOs: Technologies like Generative
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
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
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
In a prescient presentation in July 2017, Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz predicted a future where, out of necessity, computing would shift from the cloud to the edge, closer to where the workloads lived. You have to remember that in 2017, cloud computing was really just beginning
Per usual, there was a lot to write about this week, and frankly I was torn between the memo from Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke requiring employees to use AI, and Google’s announcement of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol at Google Cloud Next, but in spite of the attention the the
In the late 1990s, a new kind of browser-based file sharing software platform emerged called Napster. Almost immediately folks began sharing copyrighted music and videos in numbers never previously seen. This wasn’t sharing cassettes and VHS tapes with friends and family, it was instant access to content at