FastForward #2: Writer forum looks at what’s posible with GenAI in enterprise
ForwardThinking | | Writer AI Leaders forum shows what's possible with GenAI in the enterprise | It’s been another busy week for me. I flew out to San Francisco on Monday to attend the Writer AI Leaders Forum. The main event was on Tuesday where I moderated two panels and had the opportunity to hear about the company’s product roadmap, as well some substantive customer stories, before flying home ridiculously early on Wednesday morning. | What’s interesting about generative AI at the moment is that in spite of the incredible hype and the huge amount of investment being thrown at it, not a lot of companies are finding immediate success, at least in ways they can meaningfully measure. This has led us down into Gartner’s trough of disillusionment. | Consider that an October report from Boston Consulting Group on the state of generative AI in business, called appropriately enough Where’s the value in AI, found that just 26 percent of companies had advanced beyond the proof of concept stage almost two years after the release of ChatGPT. This is in line with a study by Lucidworks, the enterprise search company, from earlier this year that found similar results with just one in four of those surveyed reporting successfully implementing generative AI projects. | In fact, Writer co-founder, CEO and chief GenAI evangelist May Habib – I added that last part, it’s not part of her official title – acknowledged the negativity in her opener. But she was there to combat that narrative and bring in some big guns that are using Writer successfully today to implement generative AI inside large enterprise settings including companies like Uber, Salesforce, Accenture and Franklin-Templeton to name but a few. | It doesn’t hurt that the company is well funded, having just announced a $200 million Series C investment on a $1.9 billion valuation (Note that boldstart is not an investor.) That’s a big deal in today’s investment environment, given that copious amounts cash with larger valuations have become much harder to come by in recent years. Habib feels that the money not only sends a signal to customers that they are in it for the long haul as a company, it allows them the luxury to go after customers who may not be ready to buy right now. | “From a go-to-market perspective, it really allows us to invest ahead of the demand. And you know, we know that we've got a very differentiated approach that is quite hard to copy. And so, from a go-to-market perspective, it means everybody who wants this product, we want them to know who Writer is [even if they’re not quite ready to buy yet].” | When you have large companies like Salesforce, Workday, IBM and Adobe joining traditional venture capital firms for the Series C, it also sends a message to potential customers and helps expand Writer’s market without necessarily having to invest further in sales and marketing to do so because they are getting these large partners to help open doors for them. | There is certainly a lot going on in generative AI in the enterprise – look at Kustomer and CrewAI as examples in the boldstart portfolio – but Writer is helping everyone in the space through their funding, their messaging, their customers and their product road map to show that in spite of the disillusionment we are seeing now in parts of the market, there is still tremendous potential with this technology, and Writer’s founders want their startup to be one of the companies helping others to fulfill that. | | |
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What's new on FastForward | | A threat hunting pioneer discusses evolution of cyber security | Charles Henderson might not be a household name, but in the early 1990s he was part of an intrepid group of early threat hunters who would eventually help shape the cybersecurity industry. | Speaking of those early days, he said:
“You would almost do vulnerability research as independent study because back then there wasn't really an industry, per se. We were doing vulnerability research because it was fun, and it was kind of cool to find vulnerabilities." | | AWS outlines a more coherent AI strategy at this year’s re:Invent | At last year's AWS re:Invent, Amazon's massive cloud conference, there was a general feeling that perhaps Amazon was a couple of steps behind Microsoft and finding itself in the uncomfortable position of playing catchup when it came to generative AI. | This year while announcing its own large language models, the company's strategy around Bedrock, enabling customers to manage multiple models in one place, came into clearer focus and when combined with its infrastructure muscle and custom chips, it felt like a much more coherent and powerful message. | As Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategies put it: | “This year’s re:Invent is all about scaling generative AI and introducing agentic AI, which is unsurprising. It’s about reducing cost and simplifying enterprise AI for developers, data jockeys, IT, business line leaders and even executives." | | Salesforce CIO talks about dog-fooding his own products | Salesforce CIO Juan Perez told me that he has a unique position when it comes to implementing AI because he not only uses it operationally like his fellow CIOs, but he also works for a company selling AI services. | “If you spoke with a CIO in another company, the response would be very different from mine because I happen to be in an organization that is prioritizing AI in its products,” he said. “We have a direct line of engagement with [the AI team], and we learn from them because my team gets an opportunity to work closely with them as we are building products that we're going to support our customers with.” | |
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Google launches gemini 2.0 with agentic capabilities | As the AI arms race continues, the bigger names like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Amazon continue to duke it out. Last week, Google released its video production tool; Veo. This week OpenAI released its long awaited counterpart called Sora (albeit with release issues and crashes). | Not to be outdone, Google raised the stakes again when it announced Gemini 2.0 in limited release. The update is multi-modal, meaning it can handle text, images and videos, multilingual and it can tap into third party services. The company says these advancements should help companies as AI agents, which are designed to undertake multiple tasks, become more prevalent in 2025. | |
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Microsoft introduces Zero-water evaporation to reduce data center water usage | One huge impact of AI has been the massive increase in resources needed to run the growing number of AI workloads inside of data centers. This has put pressure on cloud companies to find new sources of power like nuclear power plants. It has also put pressure on water supplies in communities where these data centers are based to help cool the systems. | This week Microsoft announced a new capability that involves a process they call 'zero water evaporation' to reduce the amount of water required to run their data centers. As Microsoft explained in a blog post announcing the new capability: | "These new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply." | |
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Google's Quantum Chip Breakthrough | It was a big week for Google. Not only did it announced its new large language model, Gemini 2.0, it also announced a major quantum computing breakthrough with its latest quantum chip dubbed Willow. Google says that this baby is faster and more accurate than previous chips as quantum computing continues to quietly make advances, even as generative AI steals its thunder. | |
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DoD is investing in tech to Identify deep fakes | Businesses aren't alone in worrying about the increasing capabilities of deep fake technologies. The military has to worry about fake information too, especially with the high stakes world of geopolitics. The department is investing a modest $2.4 million over the next two years with a startup called Hive AI to help them identify deep fakes more easily. | |
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| The British Museum Reading Room, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
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There is no monopoly in algorithms or data or talent, and I think this is core in the way we think about how we compete with all these big companies, which is just building an amazing connected team and hard work
- Waseem Alshikh, co-founder and CTO at Writer
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Photo by Jaimie Soja
