The Ledger, every show

“The alternative model is you just say, hey, we're just going to embed AI into everything. And then you're like, well, shoot, now my costs just explode. And also equally, you have this, like, you know, disadvantage, which is the power user is being subsidized b…”

“There's no AI budget per se. When I, and when I referenced that, it's sort of like, there's every, everybody has like just some discretionary dollars for, you know, some R and D or innovation thing. And so that's probably right now the totality of the kind of …”

“Then I personally would sequence product-led growth and nail that because you will always be able to layer in a sales motion on top of a product-led growth engine because the DNA of product-led growth ends up being a lot harder to sort of rewire in later becau…”

“There will be a lot of bets that will not work in that model. Because again, back to category, you know, one, there are lots of challenges companies run into. So we will see spectacular failures in this approach, but ultimately they might get paid for by the s…”

“We will see a correction. I just don't believe it's going to be a sudden correction that will feel like a sort of bubble burst. I think it'll be, you know, more pressure for keeping valuations in some reasonable band that still, compared to 15 years ago, will …”

“The idea of taking petabytes of files or information and sort of storing those 10 or a hundred or a thousand times is just actually going to be quite inflationary to the technology market, and I don't think customers will ultimately want to pay for that.”

“I think we think of, you know, the tech industry as being very mobile. Well, it turns out construction workers are actually far more mobile than those of us in the tech industry.”

“Once you understand that dynamic, then actually the, your growth and your scale of your business is actually most functional to how much you invest in, in scaling it up. So once we figured that part out, and once capital was relatively cheap, we just decided, …”

“What I would say is, is that there's plenty of room For companies that are benefiting from this very clearly secular change toward cloud and mobile. And if you've built a significant business on the back or benefiting from that, then there's maybe room, there'…”

“In the nineties and you had to sort of top down sell your software to get in, in the first place, then you had to make some really, really key early trade offs. Like you had to actually decide where am I going to get a flywheel effect going? And you don't real…”

“So imagine a security incident. You obviously would want to respond to it as quickly as possible. So that'll become entirely agentic.”

“So you've got at a minimum five leading US labs that at a minimum within a very relatively narrow band are gonna all be following each other at the frontier, which is fantastic.”

“We, as consumers, are probably gonna start to experience this model progress kind of almost less and less.”

“What's funny is actually the accelerationists and the doomers sort of share roughly the same timeline, because they both think that AI is the, like, intelligence is the only thing that matters.”

“Some of the use case, some of the top use cases we see from customers with our AI agent and their data, Are actually things that they never deployed people at before. So it's, I want to go and have an agent read every contract in our company, because I want to…”

“I would say the vast majority of the current agent expend that's happening is sustainable because partly because it's actually coming mostly from engineering and engineering related, related tasks. And this is an audience that is kind of technically capable of…”

“And so if AI is, you know, truly adding this productivity gain to your engineering team or your client onboarding process or your marketing team, then clearly you don't want to be trapped by this sort of three to seven percent in the business. It's going to es…”

“The code base has so much of the context in coding. Whereas in the rest of knowledge work, the context lives across like 20 different things. Some digital and some very not digital, you know, kind of mediums.”

“Nobody's signing up for more than like one year deals with the labs.”

“So, so to some extent, the speed of our change in, in tech actually reduces the ability for the tech to get diffused into the really, really important workflows. Because now you have a lot of paralysis in, in just making decisions.”

“I would just say that, that, that any software that has a good API, the agent would absolutely prefer To use the API.”

“AI built probably 80 to 90% of the feature. And the thing that slowed down the release of it was we have to do a full security review because we can't let there be any, you know, accidental code injection into the thing that we created.”

“Automation is going to actually just force us to see the next set of bottlenecks that are in all of these industries that we didn't perceive that we had before because everything was so slow and manual.”

“Agents are going to be this incredible consumer and creator of your unstructured data. They're gonna Read through every one of your contracts and generate all of your contracts. They're going to generate marketing assets. They're going to write reports for you…”

“The volume of API usage on our system is already enormous and already, you know, is outsized relative to any of the end user interactions in the system.”

“The budget of tokens will have to move out of IT spend and into regular kind of OPEC spend. This can't be treated like a, oh, you know, I'm going to trade off between Salesforce licenses or compute tokens. Like it's going to more be, I'm going to trade off You…”

“The information sources aren't the classic ones. It's not the roll up review two weeks later from your traditional news publication that is going to give you any kind of alpha. It's the practitioner who's the, you know, literally the engineer at the, you know,…”

“And in the past year, those capabilities have just absolutely accelerated. To the point where I'm fully convinced that you just, you have to be, you know, headless first as a software platform.”

“Companies are going to adopt multiple of these systems. They don't want to be single vendor. They don't want to be, they don't want to have single vendor in this stack. One service goes down, or one changes its APIs, or one has a new commercial model. You're g…”

“And then I'm like, oh, actually everybody on the entire planet, if you're putting agents into an enterprise workflow needs evals. Because you need to know if all of a sudden your agent just stopped producing, you know, like you know, loan origination documents…”

“And so I think we're clearly moving from a world where you will use AI as this thing you chat back and forth with. And that was kind of the first manifestation of the chat bot to now a paradigm where the agent is given a task. It has a set of resources it has …”

“So this is kind of the big prize because it goes from the TAM The total addressable market being, you know, all of engineers to now the total addressable market is every knowledge worker, and that's probably about a 30 to 50 x larger market in terms of, you kn…”

“So all of those things add up to actually just meaning that, that the diffusion of these types of technologies will take many, many years as they go through the rest of the world.”

“But I actually think that that you'll still have that ultimate person. Maybe what they'll review is five different cuts as options. And they are now playing the role of the, you know, the most senior editor in a, you know, TV show that, that, that, that, that …”

“What we're gonna now be able to do is we will be able to run, you know, on the order of 10 to a hundred times more experiments across, you know, everything that we want to go detect.”

“And so we are gonna be in for, again, years and years of enterprises realizing that an AI problem is really a data problem, and to get the AI the right data, They need to make sure they have infrastructure, software, tools, systems that all are in service of g…”

“We have an eval that we give all of the new models. It's basically a complex knowledge work task, which is we give the, an agent a set of documents to work with, and then we ask it a series of very, very hard questions that we think correlate to pretty high en…”

“If you have a hundred or a thousand times more agents than people, then your software has to be built for agents, and then what is the way that those agents are going to interact with your system? It's going to be through an API or a CLI.”

“Everybody that built a SaaS business or a software business is like, the game is, can you build really, really high quality APIs? Can you have a way of monetizing that? You know, do you have a way of handling the identities and all of the access controls for a…”

“Every agent really loves working with files, so there'll probably be more files in the future than there was going to be before, and so, you know, can we build a platform that, like, makes it really easy for agents to work with that data? You know, we, we're b…”

“I don't think we've ever had a point where the end you, every end user in an organization has sort of a completely elastic ability to spin up a resource on their behalf.”

“You know, whether you think the number is 10 X or a hundred X or whatever the number is, we're going to have some order of magnitude more agents than people. That's inevitable. It has to happen.”

“There's going to be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt inject an agent and Sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to.”

“The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have a…”

“So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with AI, which is the agent just is you. And when you're in cloud code and you're in cursor and you're in codex, you're just, the agent is you, you're offing into your services. It can do everything…”

“These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between, can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise context that are not leaking…”

“OpenAI probably is hiring FDEs to go into the enterprise and then Anthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.”

“Today, we have a context engineering problem, which is I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or probably, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like, massive degradation. Okay, I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with, where I'…”