Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

Charles Guillemet is CTO of Ledger and the founder of the Donjon, Ledger's internal offensive security lab whose job is to break the company's own products before attackers do. He spent a decade in cryptography and hardware security before Ledger, including designing secure integrated circuits. His argument is blunt: you cannot secure an AI agent with software alone. As agents start moving real mo...

Jiaona Zhang(JZ) is the Chief Product Officer at Laurel, where the team runs its own product on itself to see exactly where AI helps and where it doesn't. Before Laurel, JZ built products at Airbnb, Dropbox, Webflow, and Linktree, and she has taught product management at Stanford for nearly a decade. Companies are spending billions on AI tooling, but most still can't say where it returns time or r...

Most of the web will never get APIs for AI agents. School district sites, small business pages, government offices, and the long tail of e-commerce were built for humans, and they will keep working that way for years. So how do agents actually get things done across the web? Dhruv Batra is co-founder and chief scientist of Yutori, the company building specialized browser and computer-use agents. H...

Kristin "Kris" Lovejoy has spent her career inside the systems the global economy runs on: banks, hospitals, energy grids, governments. Today she is Global Head of Strategy at Kyndryl, the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider, working with mission-critical enterprises across more than 60 countries. Before that she ran security businesses at EY and IBM, founded the AI security compan...

Jerry Liu built one of the most installed pieces of AI plumbing of the last three years. LlamaIndex became the indexing and retrieval layer a whole generation of RAG apps were stitched together with. Then he started arguing that the framework era he helped create is over. Jerry is co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex. In this conversation he walks through the company's pivot from open-source framework...

Tyler Akidau spent 12 years on streaming systems at Google and five years at Snowflake before joining Redpanda as CTO. He wrote the O'Reilly Streaming Systems book most of the field has on its shelf. His new piece on O'Reilly Radar (Post-Human: We All Built Agents, Nobody Built HR) argues that enterprises are stuck in the prototype-to-production gap because they're applying human-era identity, aut...

Loïc Houssier leads engineering at Superhuman, the email client Grammarly acquired for ~$825 million in July 2025. Before Superhuman he was CTO of OpenTrust (acquired by DocuSign), ran engineering at ProductBoard, and started his career in applied cryptography for France's defense industry, including work on nuclear submarine systems. Loïc joined Superhuman in early 2024 and within 30 days was lea...

Job applications are up 239% since ChatGPT launched, tech layoffs show no signs of slowing down, and the market for technical talent is a topsy turvy mess.  Greenhouse has a unique vantage point to understand all of this: they process 22 million job applications a month across 7,500+ companies including HubSpot, Anthropic, Coinbase, and the NFL. CEO Daniel Chait has had a front-row seat to the str...

Alex Ratner co-founded Snorkel AI out of Chris Ré's Stanford lab and helped establish data-centric AI as a field. Today, Snorkel is a $1.3B company shipping thousands of data sets and environments a week to frontier labs and vertical AI teams like Harvey. In this conversation, he argues our ability to build AI agents has outpaced our ability to measure them. That gap is what's keeping most enterpr...

What happens when a VP of AI Software at a major chip company goes all-in on AI coding agents for his own team's work? Anush Elangovan runs 10–12 Claude Code agents across three machines, burns 6.5 billion tokens a week, and rewrote a 25-year-old project (Slurm → Spur in Rust) in a single night. He does it all on dangerously-skip-permissions. About Anush Anush Elangovan is Corporate VP of AI Softw...

Sudhir Hasbe is President and Chief Product Officer at Neo4j, the graph database company powering 84 of the Fortune 100 (Walmart, Uber, Airbus) at $200M+ ARR and a $2B+ valuation. Before Neo4j, he ran product for all of Google Cloud's data analytics services: BigQuery, Looker, Dataflow, and led the Looker acquisition. His thesis: the hallucinations we blame on AI models are really a data architect...

Every few weeks at Microsoft, someone would build an AI prototype that blew everyone's minds. Three months later? Dead. "We can never ship that." Dan Klein watched this happen for five years before he decided to do something about it. Dan is co-founder and CTO of Scaled Cognition, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, and winner of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. His previous startups...

Richmond Alake is Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle and one of the most concrete voices on agent memory right now. His AI Engineer World's Fair talk on architecting agent memory crossed 100,000 views, he built the open-source MemoRIS library, and he co-created a course with Andrew Ng. In this conversation, Richmond walks through memory engineering as a distinct discipline from prompt e...

Michel Tricot co-founded Airbyte, the open source data integration platform with 600+ free connectors that hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Now he's building the company's next product: an agent engine, currently in public beta. His thesis is that agents don't fail because models are bad. They fail because the data feeding them is wrong: context poisoning is killing them. Michel demos this live. A si...

Yujian Tang started the r/AI_Agents subreddit in April 2023. For the first year, it barely moved. Then it hit 9,000 members, he went on vacation, came back to 36,000, and now it's approaching 300,000. In this episode, Yujian talks about how that community grew alongside his event business (Seattle Startup Summit, 900+ attendees last year), his two failed startups, and why he just filed paperwork t...

Sterling Chin stopped thinking of AI as a tool and started treating it like a junior employee. Onboarded it with context, corrected its mistakes, and gave it writing rules. Forty days later, MARVIN was handling 90% of his workday. In this episode of Chain of Thought, Sterling (Applied AI Engineer and Senior Developer Advocate at Postman) walks through live demos of MARVIN, his personal AI assistan...

Intercom was spending $250K/month on a single summarization task using GPT. Then they replaced it with a fine-tuned 14B parameter Qwen model and saved almost all of it. In this episode, Intercom's Chief AI Officer, Fergal Reid, walks through exactly how they made that call, where their approach has changed over time, and how all of their efforts built their Fin customer service agent. Fergal break...

How do you deploy AI agents to 12,000 employees in just 8 weeks? How do you do it safely? Angie Jones, VP of Engineering for AI Tools and Enablement at Block, joins the show to share exactly how her team pulled it off. Block (the company behind Square and Cash App) became an early adopter of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and built Goose, their open-source AI agent that's now a reference implementat...

Google DeepMind is reshaping the AI landscape with an unprecedented wave of releases—from Gemini 3 to robotics and even data centers in space. Paige Bailey, AI Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind, joins us to break down the full Google AI ecosystem. From her unique journey as a geophysicist-turned-AI-leader who helped ship GitHub Copilot, to now running developer experience for DeepMind's...

You've heard of evaluations—but eval engineering is the difference between AI that ships and AI that's stuck in prototype. Most teams still treat evals like unit tests: write them once, check a box, move on. But when you're deploying agents that make real decisions, touch real customers, and cost real money, those one-time tests don't cut it. The companies actually shipping production AI at scale...

AI is destroying the planet—or so we've been told. This week on Chain of Thought, we tackle one of the most persistent and misleading narratives in the AI conversation. Andy Masley, Director of Effective Altruism DC, joins host Conor Bronsdon to fact-check the absurd AI environmental claims you've heard at parties, in articles, and even in bestselling books. Andy recently went viral for discoverin...

AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, but model quality isn’t the only constraint we face.. There are major infrastructure requirements, energy needs, security, and data pipelines to run AI at scale. This week on Chain of Thought, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel joins host Conor Bronsdon to reveal what it actually takes to build the critical foundation for the AI era. Jee...

The transformer architecture has dominated AI since 2017, but it’s not the only approach to building LLMs - and new architectures are bringing LLMs to edge devices Maxime Labonne, Head of Post-Training at Liquid AI and creator of the 67,000+ star LLM Course, joins Conor Bronsdon to challenge the AI architecture status quo. Liquid AI’s hybrid architecture, combining transformers with convolutional...

Most AI agents are built backwards, starting with models instead of system architecture. Aishwarya Srinivasan, Head of AI Developer Relations at Fireworks AI, joins host Conor Bronsdon to explain the shift required to build reliable agents: stop treating them as model problems and start architecting them as complete software systems. Benchmarks alone won't save you.  Aish breaks down the evolution...

This week, we're doing something special and sharing an episode from another podcast we love: The Humans of AI by our friends at Writer. We're huge fans of their work, and you might remember Writer's CEO, May Habib, from the inaugural episode of our own show. From The Humans of AI : Learn how Melisa Russak, lead research scientist at WRITER, stumbled upon fundamental machine learning algorithms, c...