Futurum Media: AI Is Changing Media, and Now So Are We

Futurum Media, go-to-market execution built for technology companies. Create stories that matter. Reach the right people.

Build credibility. Activate demand. Futurum Media.

" I got to apologize. " I was out in Denver at a conference two weeks ago. Last week, I was down here in Fort Lauderdale of all places at a conference.

It was a great conference with the folks at Avalara. " I'm sorry, but it's not that I don't want to. Anyway, I'm here today though to talk about some big news we broke today.

Instead of reporting the news, we're making the news. And it's pretty funny. I spend a good amount of my time talking about how AI is changing your business, changing everybody's business.

Today, I want to talk specifically about how it's changing my business, our business. I want to talk about Futurum Media and why it's changing and why it has to change in this world of AI. We're launching Futurum Media out of what we've already had at Futurum all along, and which is various business units in the media end of the business, such as Techstrong and Tech Field Day, Visible Impact.

But Futurum Media is much more than the sum of Techstrong, Tech Field Day, and Visible Impact. It's part of the broader Futurum coalition, the broader Futurum business. It's backed by the research of the Futurum advisory team, the intelligence of our Futurum Intelligence Platform, the expertise of the Futurum group from Signal65, our testing lab, to ETR, our real-time tracking of IT spending and intelligence.

But make no mistake, this whole change, this whole coming together is being driven by AI. AI is the catalyst here. Because AI is changing media.

We're changing because we have to. But what I'm really excited about with Futurum Media is that we have an opportunity to help shape what does media become in this new AI era. What changes, what stays the same, what does it morph into?

And that's why we're doing this now. Because AI's already changed how people discover information, how we evaluate technology, and most importantly maybe, how we decide who to trust. And quite frankly, a lot of us don't know who to trust anymore.

This predates AI, where people were fake news, not fake news. AI's only made that problem a lot worse. People are looking for trustworthy sources, trustworthy places where they can get not just news, but information, community, and how decisions get made in business.

For our sponsors and customers at Futurum and our community, they're looking to figure out how do buyers find them in this new world. They don't Google search. Should they AI search?

Should they go to trusted sources? The funny thing is, all this AI is making content easier. The bottleneck used to be how many articles or how many writers can I hire?

But today, I could hire a lot of writers because there's so many of them available for work, quite frankly. They use AI. That's okay as long as what they're saying and writing is their work product.

So producing content is easier than ever. Giving people something that's worth their time, though, that takes work. We could produce AI slop till the cows come home.

We could produce content. But our audiences need more than that. They need technical understanding.

They need really informed opinions from trustworthy sources. They need evidence. Our customers, who are mostly vendors, they need credible ways to reach the audiences that come to Techstrong.

They need better ways of explaining how their technology fits into this new world. That same thinking, by the way, applies to Futurum Media as well because our business is changing in the way we're bringing and covering everyone else's. So let me state a couple of things up front, though, in case you're wondering.

Nothing really changes at Techstrong in terms of our websites, our journalism commitment, our videos, our events, our relationships across the communities. If anything, it expands. Same holds true for my friends at Tech Field Day, my friend Stephen Foskett and his team.

Experienced practitioners questioning the people building technology and examining how it works, that's still what Tech Field Day is all about. And Visible Impact, the third leg of the stool here, our friend Lee Sellers, Guy Curio, who's sometimes on the gang, positioning technical storytelling and helping companies turn understanding into useful sales conversations, we're still going to be doing that. But together, these three units help companies create credible stories, reach the right people, build engagement, activate demand, and still give you the news and information you need to make critical decisions about your business, about your career, about your lives.

I don't need to give you customer examples. You can go to our sites and get all that. But you know who we are and what we are and what we've done.

We're going to keep the focus on that. More than that, though, hey, we've got the full Futurum organization behind us here. Futurum Media is just the tip of the iceberg.

There's a big mountain underneath that water. We've got, as I mentioned before, Futurum Research with a full bench of analysts examining technology markets, the decisions ahead. ETR, enterprise buyer priorities, adoption, and spending intelligence.

Signal65, engineering, testing, and technical evaluation. Futurum Intelligence Platform. This gives you access to proprietary research and market data, including G2 data, the ETR data, and the Futurum analyst.

Unmatched. Six Five Media, our sister company that does a lot of videos with analysts and tech companies executives. In AI, though, the model's only part of this story.

We launched Techstrong Semi. We're covering silicon and infrastructure. We're covering data, software, and security.

All of this is being heavily influenced, heavily affected, heavily changed and disrupted by AI. This is the kinds of conversations and perspectives that we need to bring to you, that our sponsors and partners want to bring to you, and they're looking to us to be the vessel for it. A couple of months ago, Futurum went and launched this whole forward analyst thing.

Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum, wrote a lot about it. I really like the idea. It combines sort of the forward deployed engineer of Palantir with the information of, let's say, a Bloomberg.

And what it means for forward analysts is instead of telling you about what the metrics last year showed, it's helping you figure out what you're going to do next year, this coming year. And things like where are buyers putting their money? What advances can change the economics of your plans?

What are today's assumptions that may be obsolete tomorrow? I took that and ran with it, and we turned it, here in Techstrong into something we call Forward Media, because we bring that kind of same attitude, that same vision into what we're reporting, our interviews, our technical discussions. But those conversations go both ways.

They go with you, end user practitioners, executives. They go with our sponsors and customers. They go even in our own internal discussions.

Because that's why we are affecting this change. The people deploying the technology may have a question nobody on the conference stage has answered yet, but we need to hear that question. We need to understand what those questions are, what those issues are, and that's why we need to be forward.

People want sources they can trust. We need to be that trustworthy source, whether it's our research, which needs to reflect what people are seeing. Practitioners have to be free to reach their own conclusions, of course, but they need sources of information they can trust, and that includes editorial judgment, too.

That remains independent. Editorial here is not bought and paid for. Commercial sponsor programs are clearly identified.

Again, AI helps us do the work. It's a tool. But we remain responsible for what we publish.

If my name's on it, I stand behind it. The relationships we've built depend on continuing on earning your trust, your attention, giving you value. Let me talk about my own connection here.

I've been a builder and a leader of companies now for 35 years. It's been constant throughout my career in technology, commercial internet hosting, application service providers, managed infrastructure. I played in all of them.

Security before it was cyber. DevOps, cloud native, platform engineering, AI. Everyone's AI.

I got to be totally transparent. I didn't know if I had it in me to go build a company again. I didn't expect to be building again at this scale after all these years, to quote a turn of phrase.

But AI is making us all builders. It's making us all creators. It's giving us the opportunity to create and experience things in a new way.

And I'm exhilarated by it. I'm energized by it. I'm happy to be, do it.

I'm happy to be part of it. " It let me, after 20 years of threatening to write a book, to dive in and examine AI's economics, the bets being made, how it relates to prior technical build-outs, and whether you want to call them booms, bust, or whatever. Where does lasting value reside?

What assumptions hold up? Can I question those bets and still be excited about what AI enables? You bet I can.

I'm bringing that same curiosity and scrutiny to Futurum Media. I take it as my personal charge to help people understand the possibilities, ask the hard questions about what direction they should be heading, and then provide the proof as to why they should do it. I'm really thrilled to be one of the leaders of Futurum Media alongside my friends Lee Sellers, founder of Visible Impact, and Steven Foskett, the founder of Tech Field Day.

We've been working together now for two-plus years talking about just this very thing. But it's not just Lee and Steven and I. It's everyone at Techstrong.

It's everyone at Tech Field Day. It's everyone at Visible Impact. It's the whole Futurum team.

I want to recognize our editors, like Mike Vizard and Jon Swartz, Natan Solomon even. The analysts at Futurum, like my friend Mitch Ashley and Fernando Montenegro and Nick Price, Daniel Newman himself, the producers, my video team, the marketers, sales team. We've got a great new guy, Brian McGovern, who came over and really excited about his leadership of the Futurum Media sales team.

It's everyone who's supporting this work, contractors, full-time people. It's you, our readers, our contributors, the practitioners, executives, and partners who are the lifeblood of our business. It's your expertise and participation and trust that give us the foundation for what we can build on.

So I want to renew that invitation to all of you today. I'd like everyone watching this to participate because we want to help people understand the technology that's out there right now, question its direction, and put it to useful work. We want to hear your questions.

I want to hear your comments, your thoughts, your experiences, what ideas you have, because that's what we need in order to give you back what you need. com/media. But as I said before, I'm happy to be one of the leaders of the team, and I'm excited as hell about what we're going to build together here.

I really am. I talked about Forward Analyst. I talk about Forward Media.

I say forward engage. This is Shimmy. I'm out.

We'll see you next Thursday. Futurum Media.