It's natural human tendency. When you're in a forest and don’t know where danger is, you move slowly. This is a mega forest. You adopt slowly because you don’t know yet.
AI’s mega forest is dense, fast-moving, and easy to get lost in. The way through doesn't depend on speed, but on deliberate steps rooted in trust and execution.
Arjun Saksena is the Founder and CEO of Humanic, an AI-native company building agentic tools for email marketing. From his vantage point, success comes from effort, not shortcuts.
Watch your step: "It's natural human tendency. When you're in a forest and don’t know where danger is, you move slowly," says Saksena. "This is a mega forest. You adopt slowly because you don’t know yet." That caution, he believes, is essential amid a "Cambrian explosion" of AI tools and ideas. It’s not about avoiding the unknown, it’s about surviving long enough to see what actually lasts.
Don't stop the grind: "We've always known we've had this data, but it's been hard to find. AI is surfacing that data in an instant," Saksena says. And while AI may boost productivity and shrink team sizes, it doesn't remove the need for due diligence. "It's not a light switch that you just turn on or off," explains Saksena. "You still have to put in the effort."
It's not a light switch that you just turn on or off. You still have to put in the effort.
Dot-com déjà vu: Beneath the talk of tools, Saksena sees a constant: "Humans, at the end of the day, only trust humans." Building something sustainable still comes down to relationships and deep market understanding. He draws a parallel to the dot-com era, where the survivors were those who "kept low to the ground, continued to build, continued to sell." Saksena states that "high valuations are nice, but they don't last." What lasts is execution. "Anyone who executes better is going to win."
Earning trust: "If I don't see you putting in effort, I have no reason to entrust my business with your tool or with you," Saksena says. In his view, that’s the heart of sales, and it always has been. Even in an AI-saturated market, buying decisions still hinge on one thing: trusting someone else to do the job better than you can yourself.
Greenfield, not greenlight: Despite his call for caution, Saksena is energized by what he calls "the age of the workflow builders." He sees "a lot of greenfield opportunity that has not existed for a long time" in turning human knowledge into digital form. But even here, progress depends on that same step-by-step approach. It’s still the mega forest, just a more promising patch of it.
