06.06.2025

ForwardThinking 🤔

Humans still matter

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 human-like intelligence that could arrive soon, or perhaps not for decades, or maybe never. Nobody really knows. Yet amid all of this noise, one message keeps surfacing: humans, not the latest technology, should be at the center of every business decision, whether that involves employees or customers.

If you think about the core of most any business, it involves people creating products and finding ways to market and sell them to other humans. As much as AI dominates the conversation these days, that fundamental reality hasn’t changed, and likely won’t anytime soon.

AI aside, appealing to people means thinking about them, caring for them, and engaging with them in meaningful, positive ways. Yet managers are also taught to focus on the bottom line, and people cost money. For some, the prospect of replacing people with bots is appealing—a capitalist dream of always-on productivity with no downtime. But every business decision brings unintended consequences, and going all in on AI is no exception.

Not so fast

It turns out that people prefer to deal with other people in a lot of instances. We’ve already seen companies trying to replace human workers with bots, getting burned, and walking it back. Eleanor Warnock, writing in a Sift OpEd, pointed out that these leaders found out the hard way that customers and employees need to come first, even in the face of a massive technological shift we are experiencing at the moment. Those leaders who fail to realize that are going to hear about it.

“The backlash will come, whether that is from customers who are fed up with not being able to get through to a human or employees who feel undervalued and exploited,” Warnock wrote. She was referring, in this case, to two companies in particular that had publicly embraced AI, Klarna and Duolingo, only to backtrack when faced with the grim reality that you can’t lose sight of people in the business equation. Nor can you think that AI is the answer to every question. It’s not and it shouldn’t be.

People working in customer service center with head sets on.

Photo by Charanjeet Dhiman on Unsplash

Last year, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski very publicly stated his company would be replacing customer service employees with AI, only to find that it resulted in a big backlog of unresolved problems and a lot of unhappy customers. He recently announced plans to hire human agents again.

In Duolingo’s case, CEO Luis von Ahn announced that he wanted to replace human employees with bots and was forced to respond to angry customers who were none too happy with his decision. Like Siemiatkowski, he responded to customer anger by reversing course. “To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality,” he wrote in a mea culpa post on LinkedIn.

“It's important to remember that the voice of the customer is the only voice that really matters and they deserve to have greater attention."
~Brian Solis

Maintaining the focus on your customers

Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow, and author of eight business books, sees it in similar terms. You should welcome new ways of doing things, but keep your eye firmly focused on your customers and employees, or you could lose your way, as these executives found. “It's important to remember that the voice of the customer is the only voice that really matters and they deserve to have greater attention," Solis said. That means that ultimately, no matter how advanced technology becomes, businesses that prioritize genuine human connection have the best chance of sustaining lasting loyalty and growth.

Sale writen in multiple fonts in a window.

Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash

As author and marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly put it in his blog last year, every business has a choice to engage or not. “[Customer Service] is either part of your strategy or you’re paying for your mistake,” he said. Klarna and Duolingo certainly learned that lesson along the way, didn’t they?

Nikkia Revillac, who has held senior leadership roles at major brands like Netflix, Twitter and Colgate-Palmolive and who often speaks about human-centric leadership and organizational transformation, offered a broader view. “In a world increasingly shaped by automation, the ultimate competitive advantage isn’t technological—it’s human. It’s the ability to deeply understand people and create the conditions where people can do their best work.”

It's impossible to miss the overarching theme here. As these thought leaders make clear, managers who overlook the human element do so at their own peril.

~Ron

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"What's beautiful about this is that all of this processing happens in real time. So we have computer vision inferencing models that run on edge GPU servers. It's processing multiple 4k video streams and processing all of this in real time."

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Photo courtesy of Sam's Club

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As companies continue to move towards a future agentic vision, every SaaS company is going to want to be the management layer. We've seen moves from every major player. This week Workday weighed in with its agentic management vision that combines a communications gateway with an agent management and governance tool. I took a look.

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Klaviyo’s CTO keeps company firmly focused on the data

Klaviyo CTO Surabhi Gupta's background includes stints as director of engineering at Airbnb and SVP of engineering at Robinhood. We talked about how data has been a constant across her entire career, and how Klaviyo's focus on managing customer data was a a big draw for her.

"With Klaviyo, I felt that everything started with data, and the fact that you're storing all of this data for customers means that there's an infinite set of possibilities of what you can do. So in terms of the problem space and potential, I felt it was ripe for us to be doing a lot more."

Image courtesy of Klaviyo

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Salesforce opts for legacy data management with $8 billion Informatica acquisition

As we noted in last week's ForwardThinking commentary, Salesforce is back to its big deal-acquisitive ways. This time it's legacy data management company Informatica, and the price tag is a hefty $8 billion. I can see their thinking: AI feeds off data and rather than relying on a third-party data management tool, they bought one of their very own. It's only money after all, but is a legacy data management the answer for modern AI? I'm not so sure. Time will surely tell.

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News of the Week 📣

Snowflake snags Crunchy data to get a Postgres database of its own

Just three weeks after Databricks announced its plans to acquire Postgres database startup Neon for roughly $1 billion, cloud data lakehouse rival Snowflake announced a similar deal to buy Crunchy Data for $250 million.

While Snowflake and Databricks are each acquiring leading PostgreSQL providers to expand the capabilities of their cloud data platforms for building and scaling AI agent applications, there is a difference in motivation, said Devin Pratt, an IDC analyst who covers database technologies.

Photo by Carmen Keuper on Unsplash

"While these acquisitions reflect ongoing competition between the two companies, Snowflake’s move was also driven by market demand and customer interest in enterprise-grade PostgreSQL solutions," he said.

Interestingly, as part of the acquisition news, the company also announced the release of Snowflake Postgres, which addresses the enterprise-readiness that Pratt referred to.

In a blog post, Snowflake indicated the deal should be closing imminently, subject to typical closing conditions.

OpenAI introduces Connectors, a way to connect to popular enterprise Apps

In another move to lure enterprise business users to its large language model, OpenAI announced 'Connectors' this week, a new feature for paid business users. As the name implies, it enables you to connect to external business applications like Box or HubSpot and use that data as a source for your queries. This powerful approach is likely to appeal to enterprise users looking to put their internal data to work with large language models like ChatGPT instead of relying on more general data.

"We enable you to connect your internal knowledge sources to ChatGPT, so that you can find the most relevant information at the right moment," an OpenAI spokesperson said. For example, if you were using the Box connector, you could ask a question and ChatGPT would limit the responses to just information stored in the Box repository.

ChatGPT for Enterprise connecting to Box as a data source

Image courtesy of Box

VentureBeat reports that the announcement also helps OpenAI compete with companies like Microsoft, a longtime investor that has now become a rival as the two companies battle for customers looking to buy enterprise-focused AI solutions.

For those concerned about unauthorized access to sensitive information via the enterprise tool being used in this fashion, it actually maintains all existing user permissions and security settings within your organization. That means it should limit you to the information you could access if you went to the tool directly.

The enterprise tool has grown in leaps and bounds recently, reaching 3 million paid business users, according to the company.

Amazon to invest $10 billion building a new data center in North Carolina

One consequence of our increasing appetite for AI applications is a growing need for enormous data centers to deal with the massive compute requirements inherent in running generative AI. To help feed this beast, AWS announced this week that it was investing $10 billion in a new data center in North Carolina.

The investment is a continuation of a long relationship between Amazon and the Tar Heel State, which began in 2010, according to the company. It sees this latest announcement as a significant win for the state's economy.

"This investment will position North Carolina as a hub for cutting-edge technology, create hundreds of high-skilled jobs and drive significant economic growth," David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer, said in a statement.

This could be part of this year's hyperscaler building boom that we've written about with Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Meta pledging to invest $420 billion this year alone in new data center construction.

The company claims that the construction will result in 500 new jobs including data center engineers, network specialists, engineering operations managers and security specialists, all jobs that will require high skills and correspondingly good pay.

While North Carolina Governor Josh Stein embraced the partnership, there have been mixed reactions across the country when it comes to data center construction, especially given the amount of water and power required to run and cool these facilities.

Adventures in AI 🤖

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

I asked ChatGPT to do a final review of my article recently, and it suggested I provide more detail about my own publication for readers who might not be familiar with it. For context, I use the convention the first time a person is quoted, "so and so told FastForward." Here's the feedback:

"FastForward" mention: If this is meant as a new publication, it might be worth clarifying once ("FastForward, a new publication focused on...") for new readers.

OK. Thanks. 😂

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

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Look who's talking 👄

"CIOs must urgently assess where their current AI architectures intersect with MCP and whether their vendors are leading, lagging or forking the standard."

- Dion Hinchcliffe, The Futurum Group, Model Context Protocol Is the New Control Point in AI

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ForwardThinking 🤔

Humans still matter

Not so fast

Maintaining the focus on your customers

What's new on the blog 📰

How the Sam’s Club CTO used computer vision and AI to transform the customer exit experience

Workday wants to be an enterprise agentic management hub

Klaviyo’s CTO keeps company firmly focused on the data

Salesforce opts for legacy data management with $8 billion Informatica acquisition

News of the Week 📣

Snowflake snags Crunchy data to get a Postgres database of its own

OpenAI introduces Connectors, a way to connect to popular enterprise Apps

Amazon to invest $10 billion building a new data center in North Carolina

Adventures in AI 🤖

What we're reading 📚

Future CIO

Hitachi Vantara CTO: Simply buying more GPUs won’t guarantee AI success

ZDNET

How Red Hat just quietly, radically transformed enterprise server Linux

LinkedIn

How human does a humanoid robot need to look?

The Guardian

‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home

Look who's talking 👄

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FastForward #25: Humans still matter

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