No Holds Barred: Kara Swisher Offers Hot Takes on AI, Innovation and Regulation in Tech

Kara Swisher has had a front-row seat for almost everything that’s happened in the tech industry over the last 30 years—and doesn’t pull punches about what she thinks went right, wrong and what will happen next, which she did during a Q&A keynote session at ChannelCon 2024 in Atlanta with CompTIA president and CEO Todd Thibodeaux.

Interestingly, a long career as an award-winning tech journalist and author, her latest book is Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, wasn’t her childhood goal.  “I wasn’t particularly techy. I took a computer course in high school. I was a history major, essentially. I started studying propaganda, that was my interest,” she told the audience.

But by the early 1990s, she understood the implications of technology—what tech meant to consumers, businesses and society in general. “When I first saw the internet, I knew this is the next big shift, similar to the way we shifted from radio to TV and now TV to this. I understood what it meant because I had studied communications. I was very aware pretty early. Everything that could be digitized would be digitized.”

Swisher and Thibodeaux discussed topics ranging from the most impactful innovation of the last 20 years—the iPhone, they agreed—to how the AI market will shake out to what external factors contribute to, and hinder, tech innovation.

‘An Explosion of Innovation’

Apple had already been through several revolutions and evolutions before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Thibodeaux recalled standing in line when they were released and when someone came out with one and showed it off, one bystander noted, “wow, all other phones just suck now.”

Of course, there was a lot of innovation that led up to the iPhone too, Swisher noted.

“Before that, Blackberry was the ascendent phone. I was holding my Blackberry when I had my child. I had it wrapped in my hand. I said to my doctor, ‘I like tech, I don’t know what to tell you,’” said Swisher, adding that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs had told her the year before that Apple didn’t want to build a phone.

“The next year, he took it out and showed us. It was an explosion of innovation that everyone tried to copy,” she said.

Government’s Influence on Innovation—or Lack Thereof

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for monopolization of smartphone markets. That’s a big deal and it probably needed to happen, Swisher said.

“That’s their job. When they went after Microsoft, that was good for the tech economy. They hindered innovation. Innovations should bubble up from the bottom, not top down. There are only two companies now making phones, Apple and Google. When you have any company running the rules of the road, it’s an issue. They could probably fix it themselves by changing themselves, but they don’t.”

Speaking of government and tech, Swisher said a lack of regulation, including internal regulation, has become a big problem for the tech industry.

“The first lines of my book are ‘So it was capitalism after all.’ Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, I believe in capitalism. But unaccountability and enormous influence ends innovation. We don’t get as many wonderful moments anymore,” she said.

Swisher noted that a key ingredient to innovation is having a bottom-up approach, which the U.S. has, not top down like Russia or China, but added “I’m always wary of unaccountable power when you get no differences, no friction. I like a friction environment. You get better products and results that way.”

AI: The Good, the Bad and the Unknown

Meanwhile, good news for MSPs and tech vendors: there’s still time and opportunity for companies to get involved with AI—and emerge very successfully, said Swisher.
“There are going to be winners and losers. Not a lot of money is being made right now, it’s very expensive to build. There’s going to be a lot of back and forth to figure out what and who will be the standard of the industry.”

But the dust hasn’t settled and there are a lot of big companies trying to—unregulated—figure out what to do with AI and how. That concerns Swisher.

“For a lot of these companies, it’s unclear what their business model is at this moment. OpenAI is doing well but both Microsoft and Apple are critical to its success going forward. There is great opportunity for big companies to be displaced by creating new ideas,” she said.

As long as AI solutions and use can develop in a competitive ecosystem, the future should be bright, Swisher said.

“Open tolerant societies are critically important where you can push ideas back and forth. You have to have a culture of risk taking and tolerance for failure and different ideas. You don’t get that in autocratic societies at all, that’s where innovation goes to die. The ‘iron triangle’ of academia, entrepreneurship and the places where that can happen are critical.”

Swisher compared this AI era to the early days of the internet when there were “nine search engines” competing for attention. “There’s going to be winners and losers and we will see a lot of wreckage. You’re going to see it iterate. It’s not clear which companies will dominate in which areas yet, like insurance, cancer research, food production,” she said.