03.14.2025

ForwardThinking 🤔

The AI trust imperative

I spent the first part of this week at HumanX in Las Vegas, a conference focused on AI — what else? In his kickoff keynote on Monday morning, conference co-founder and CEO Stefan Weitz talked about the paradox that is AI today. While we are surely in the middle of hype bubble, that doesn’t mean the technology isn’t real or that substantial companies won’t remain when the dust settles — just as we saw with the internet bubble in the late 1990s.

But as we move through this massive change, we are going to have to believe in this software. People simply won’t be as forgiving of AI making mistakes as they will their human counterparts, and that’s something the industry has to reckon with.

In a compelling February 2024 essay called ‘It’s easier to forgive a human than a robot,’ Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson wrote that we tend to judge AI much more harshly with higher expectations for the outcomes.

Co-Founder and CEO of HumanX, speaks onstage during the HumanX AI Conference 2025

Photo of Stefan Weitz by Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference

Weitz obviously recognized this too, even as he was launching a conference dedicated to the subject. “Real progress will not occur without trust and responsibility built from day one, because without trust, all we're doing is building a high tech house of cards,” he said. “If we don't embed trust into AI systems, we're building on an unstable foundation, and scaling on untrustworthy systems will lead to regulatory backlash, consumer rejection and systemic failures,” he said, pulling no punches.

In an industry that is moving as quickly as this one with new announcements coming at us on a daily basis, mistakes seem inevitable, and are actually part of the technology regardless. That means figuring out an acceptable error rate will have to be part of the AI calculus for every company.

Hansson used the high stakes example of a self-driving car crash that results in a death — a scenario that actually has happened. As we rely more and more on this technology, it raises serious policy questions for companies and lawmakers. All it takes is one death from a self-driving car, and there are cries for tighter regulatory enforcement. Yet human drivers kill people all the time in huge numbers, and there are no calls to take cars off the road.

“Embedding trust into AI from the start is crucial to avoid costly mistakes and regulatory backlash."

Even when we’re dealing with much less serious outcomes like a customer service scenario where nobody dies from bad information, humans may judge the software severely if it gives a bad or wrong answer. And it could also result in financial loss or a reputational hit. As Hansson points out, you can’t dismiss human emotional responses to negative outcomes as you build artificial intelligence systems.

Weitz suggested, as we speed into this AI future, we need to be thinking about this right now. “Embedding trust into AI from the start is crucial to avoid costly mistakes and regulatory backlash,” he said.

Ultimately, this is going to be both a moral and business imperative, especially if we expect this software to scale in line with the vision of moving it into just about every aspect of our lives.

Over time, as it improves (assuming it does), we will probably grow to see it in a more forgiving light, but for now, where we are in history, mistakes are more likely to be judged harshly. Every company needs to keep that in mind as it navigates this technological shift.

-Ron

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Dropbox's Drew Houston: Startups still need to stick to fundamentals in spite of AI hype

I recently caught up with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. Speaking as a founder who went from idea to public company, he told me that the current AI hype cycle doesn't mean you can simply abandon startup building fundamentals.

“Whenever there are these new explosions where a new era of computing shows up, like with AI, they follow a similar kind of hype path,” he said.

But that doesn't change the fundamentals of business building. He ticked off things like “raising money is not the same as making money, revenue is not the same thing as cash flow, you still have to build good products.”

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Dropbox CEO, speaks onstage during the HumanX AI Conference 2025

Photo by Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference

Survey finds marketing pros have conflicting views of generative AI

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"To me, it’s less about confusion and more about marketers being realistic about AI's strengths and weaknesses,” Canva's head of global marketing, Emma Robinson said.

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Photo by Darius Cotoi on Unsplash

News of the Week 📣

ServiceNow snags Moveworks in deal worth almost $3 billion

This week started off with a bang when ServiceNow announced it was acquiring Moveworks, an AI chatbot and agent company, in a deal valued at close to $3 billion.

For a startup that was valued at a little over $2 billion in 2021 when valuations were highly inflated, that's a nice exit. What's more, co-founder and CEO Bhavin Shah says being acquired by a long-time partner, whom they are tightly linked with anyway, makes a lot of sense.

"By the time we rolled around to making this announcement, 250 of our 350 customers are ServiceNow customers," Shah told FastForward. He said the company has evolved from chatbots to agentic AI more recently, and that capability along with the shared customers made it an attractive target for ServiceNow.

"The Moveworks agent engine is this incredibly skilled planner that understands the enterprise, understands all the plug-ins and services that are available, and goes about and organizes that and tries to tackle the user's question," Shah explained.

In the same week, the company was acquiring Moveworks, it also announced its latest release that was also packed full of agentic AI technology.

As Jon Turow, a partner at Madrona Ventures (which was not an investor in Moveworks) told me this week, this was an "A Team acquisition," giving ServiceNow a top notch team along with the technology, revenue and customers.

Assuming the deal passes regulatory muster, it is expected to close in the second half of this year.

Intel gets a new Ceo

To say Intel has been having a rough time over the last couple of years would be a gross understatement. In fact, poor stock performance finally cost CEO Pat Gelsinger his job last year. Lip-Bu Tan, an industry veteran, will be taking over the position from the interim co-CEOs who had been keeping the position warm until they could find a permanent replacement.

The hiring of Tan appeared to be a positive signal to investors that Intel is attempting to return to some semblance of stability after a turbulent time in which it has seen its market dominance replaced by Nvidia.

The stock was up 16% this week as investors seemed to like the move, but that comes on the heels of an astonishing 60% drop in value in 2024. They still have a long way back.

In an email to employees laying out Tan's vision for the company, CIO Dive reports that he intends to return the company to its former glory, but time will tell if he can lead Intel to a more stable and profitable future.

Photo courtesy of Intel

OpenAI buying $12 billion in coreweave services over next five years

OpenAI always seems to find its way into the news cycle and this week it did it by announcing a $12 billion, five-year deal with CoreWeave for its cloud GPU services.

Just last week, CoreWeave was part of the FastForward news roundup when it announced a $4 billion IPO that valued the company at around $35 billion.

You may also recall that it relied on Microsoft as a primary customer with around two-thirds of its revenue coming from Redmond. Oh, and Microsoft reportedly announced it was pulling back on some of that spend in a case of awkward timing, something that CoreWeave later denied.

Regardless, the deal gives CoreWeave another cash cow ahead of the IPO, and OpenAI got a little piece got a piece of the IPO pie to close the deal. OpenAI will get a $350 million stake in the company under the terms of the deal, according to Reuters.

Federal government to continue antitrust probe of microsoft

Remember how enthusiastic some tech folks were about the change in administration, and how it was supposed to get government regulators off their backs? Well, we're a few months into the new administration, and some companies may be rethinking that.

Judge's gavel on computer laptop keyboard.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

Just this week the Federal Trade Commission announced that it was continuing a broad antitrust probe involving Microsoft that was begun last year under the prior administration. When you consider that and the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice to stop the $14 billion HPE-Juniper deal, the FTC case against Meta and the DoJ continuing its attempts to break up parts of Google, suddenly it doesn't look like the regulators are getting out the way.

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"There can be so much custom software that's been impossible to build. Imagine you want an app to do x, and I think there will be a world where that all of a sudden starts to become possible."

- Jeff Seibert, cofounder and CEO of Digits, speaking at HumanX this week.

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ForwardThinking 🤔

The AI trust imperative

What's new on the blog 📰

Dropbox's Drew Houston: Startups still need to stick to fundamentals in spite of AI hype

Survey finds marketing pros have conflicting views of generative AI

Snowflake’s head of AI takes an inside-out approach to developing AI solutions

News of the Week 📣

ServiceNow snags Moveworks in deal worth almost $3 billion

Intel gets a new Ceo

OpenAI buying $12 billion in coreweave services over next five years

Federal government to continue antitrust probe of microsoft

What we're reading 📚

TechCrunch

Manus probably isn't China's second 'DeepSeek moment'

Data Center Knowledge

Data Centers in Space: Separating Fact from Science Fiction

Axios

Google looks to give AI its arms and legs

LinkedIn

How We're Building an AI-Native COMPANY (Not Just an AI-Native PRODUCT)

Look who's talking 👄

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FastForward# 13: The AI trust imperative

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