Forethought CEO on the Shift to AI's New Guard

When we are seeing the whole market declaring that NVIDIA is the most important company on the planet or stock at least. How do you think about this, I hope cycle? No, I agree, Caroline, and thanks for having me back on the show. When you think about it, like in a gold rush, it's really the picks and shovels that make the most money. And I think Nvidia really is the picks and shovels business for AI. But at the end of the day, we're still in the early innings on the application layer, which I'm

most excited about. Right. I actually think about all of the money that's being spent on things like outsourcing and things like that in the customer support world. And I think I, Gen I and particularly agents are going to be the future of this industry. I think it's going to be one of the most massive software categories on the planet. To get there, you need access to compute. How have you managed to think around that, ensure that it's not eating so much of your cost, that you also have to just

keep going to the market and raising more and more in the VC world? Agreed, especially over the last year and a half call it, everything has been about efficiency. Right. And so not just in terms of people and spend like that, but in terms of compute power. And so you think about the algorithms that we use every single day, getting smarter and smarter, not just on the application layer, but using those algorithms to be smarter with our compute is how we do that. Okay. Who have you turn to in te

rms of the ecosystem to help you with that? Who have been your hyperscalers of choice? Who have been your access to GPUs? Yeah, so we do a lot with open AI, for example. We do a lot with the cloud players. So folks like Microsoft Azure, folks like Amazon US and things like that, We actually announced a partnership with us a few months ago. So what we're trying to do is be, I would say, agnostic to what's going on in the underlying layer and make sure that we can have failover fallbacks and all o

f that so that we can deliver a robust system for our customers. And let's talk about what you're delivering at the moment. You're with Instacart, Upwork, plenty of other companies turning to you to basically make my experience when using those apps more joyous, right? Where are we in the innings of of development, of having generative AI making my experience better? Absolutely. So at four thought we've been delivering AI for the past six years. And so it's exciting to see this this boom, so to

speak, in the world. But at the end of the day, I think we're still very, very early. And there's so much more to be done in this space and for thought. We're delivering agents for customer support. We're already solving more than 100 million issues a year every single year. And we think the technology is only going to get better. Labs are just the beginning. And then we saw retrieval augmented our limbs or rags. And then we saw agents, which we actually announced here on Bloomberg about a year

ago with our autofocus technology. And I think it's going to keep getting better and better. Agents, as I said, has been sort of all the talk of the town. And what's so interesting about the generative AI space is you all seem to be frenemies in some way. You're just talking about how you're you're leaning upon open AI in some way, but open AI has its itself. You then got Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of Open A.I. coming in, and he's launching, of course, CSIRO, which is also all about agents

and customers. Where do you see the landscape being? How many players will that be? Again, as I said, I think this is going to be one of the largest software categories on planet Earth, mark my words. And so there's going to be room for multiple players. And ultimately, I think what's happening is there's a shift from the old guard to the new guard. You've seen incumbents, companies like Zendesk and Salesforce and folks like that scrambling to bring AI into their strategy because being the help

desk or being the CRM is not necessarily going to cut it in an AI first future. Right? And so what we're seeing and being validated by folks like Brett Taylor entering the space is that Jenny AI and being a first in this space is going to be the way of the future. How hard is it, though, when I can understand that Upwork and Instacart, already a startup, is probably more willing to go with a startup for its own customer delivery. But when you got big older institutions, the Driscoll Salesforce w

ithin them already, how hard is it to say, no, no, no, come to this different offering and twine yourself from the incumbent? I think that's a fair question. So what we're seeing is a lot of activity in the mid-market SMB companies who are embracing the future and things like that. A lot of these larger incumbent companies, there's a lot of interest, there's a lot of hype. But are they actually making the changes that soon to be seen? And that's actually another thing. As we talk about things li

ke in video, a lot of the use cases seem to be experimental today. Right. And so I'm curious what's going to happen and what Jensen's going to say in terms of the outlook for the future as we start to see more of these technologies become put into production. Who's going to keep and truly be an AI first company and who's just experimenting? And then I'm sure Jensen might pay some lip service to the fact that it's hard to get talent as well and to scale at the size that you want to. What are some

of the things that hold back forethought or what are some of the things that are helping you grow? Absolutely. I think talent is first and foremost the most important thing. We were founded on this generative vision and leveraging both our own research, as well as research from folks like Chris Manning at Stanford, the godfather of NLP. And in terms of holding us back, I mean, the sky's the limit in terms of this market. One of the things is that it's a very noisy market. Everyone is calling th

emselves a player. Everyone is throwing AI into their name. But in a lot of ways, again, we've been at this for many years. We've stayed at the forefront. And so it's really about showing customers what is true, i.e. what you can actually deliver and what that means for their customers.