roman ugarte

“And to take that even one step further I think there is this old school software tendency to say things like, GrokBot now has. And when you think of completing that sentence, it would be like a new button to press, or it'd be a new dropdown, or it'd be a new i…”

“And those two things actually are not different problem sets. In a lot of ways, the product form factor and the ways of solving those problems is pretty much the same. And so my instinct is that I think one product will be the best form factor for both of thos…”

“There's a brand association with these things, and so I think we evaluated that path, and I think we saw what maybe some of our competitors have been doing of this is all just one surface. You add new tabs for each new form factor, and it feels a little clutte…”

“And then you zoom out a little bit and you remove yourself from the, you know, tech company-ness of it all. And you start thinking, how would a human do this? Like, what would you want from your teammates in this exact situation? And oftentimes the answer is r…”

“We certainly have seen this in, in the coding realm, and so I think what GrokBot did in response to that was, actually, you should just define automations in natural language, and you should tell your bot, remind me that at eight a.m. Every day, please, and th…”

“And so I think once you start breaking out of this is AI chat with a set of connections, which is I think where most people are conceptually now instead to This is a colleague with a computer, and anything I would ask a colleague to do on a computer, I can ask…”

“And there are a bunch of tools that sales uses that do not have well-supported MCPs or APIs. And I think that's a lot of what made bot so before and after powerful for this group was these were things that they just could not give another AI tool reliably.”

“One example was from rolling out GrokBot, one group inside of the company that was actually Incredibly bot-pilled, so to speak was our go-to-market team, was sales.”

“I will say that I think if Cursor and many other successful companies of this kind of vintage, I think if they had thought About moats slash kind of tried to work backwards from some strategy diagram or like, you know maybe more abstract notion of how a compan…”

“In a lot of the places where people think AI is, is dumb or maybe not as impactful as it's been promised, A lot of that I think is downstream of it just being harnessed in the wrong way. And so if you kind of give access to a much larger set of things, if it h…”

“The hacky, you know, you have a VPN at home and a Mac mini set up. Clearly it was not going to scale to millions of users. Clearly it's not going to be the way, importantly, that businesses take advantage of this technology.”

“I think we're in a really weird moment right now that I think we're gonna look back on and be like, I'm surprised that this is the way that a lot of people worked with AI, where you're onboarding these super intelligent new colleagues, these AI bots, and you'r…”

“And I think power tools of the future will actually be Very different from that where it is mostly just intent being expressed and good steering on the part of the human, and these AI tools abstract away all of the knobs. You should never see them unless you n…”

“I do that one too. That one's actually a very useful thing to do is you download grok bots for one of your bots. Mine is like a QA tester bot. And that way, if there's ever Bug report, or if we're kind of testing out a new build for example, example of the des…”

“The ultimate vision of GrokBot is incredibly simple, which is you should have a team of AI bots that help you with your job and help you with your life. And it should really feel like a team. It should really feel like Teammates that are autonomous are helping…”

“It's actually really important that these bots have their own computer. And part of it is what I described earlier of there are a bunch of tasks that don't have well-supported MCPs and APIs. We as humans don't do our jobs by MCPs and APIs. Like we use a comput…”

“I think it was important for the core team to be in the room for those and to just sit on a call for 20 minutes when the computer isn't spinning up or when someone's in onboarding and they're just incredibly confused. So that immediately after you're like, tha…”

“If you delegate something to someone and you're like, I know I'm going to have to be thinking about this while you're doing it. And I know it, like, Probably is not going to be quite there, and I'm going to have to intervene and kind of steer it slightly. You'…”

“And in very short order, I think the computer concept will be completely abstracted away from the user. You should never be clicking into a remote virtual machine. You should never have to take control.”

“And I think in the context of a human, for example, we have a really good analog of a lot of times I'm slacking back and forth with a teammate, we're sharing context, and a lot of times it's just much simpler to get on a five minute huddle with them, and just …”

“I have mine hooked up to like every mention of GrokBot ever on X. And it's interacting with our internal context. It's interacting with the QA tester to, like, see if it can repro any bugs or feedback that we're getting. I've hooked up to my own kind of messag…”

“So when we rolled out GrokBot internally, there was about a week or two where the common pattern of the way people would interact with the products was you would have five to 10 bots. In each bot you would give a different scope, a different domain, and it was…”

“When I joined Cursor originally, we were about 15 people. We scaled to about, to over a thousand. And then now we're a part of SpaceX AI, which is kind of an even bigger organization.”

“Cursor, for example, and some of our coding products, people use it for non-coding tasks all the time.”

“I think we're going to see more of that type of stuff where the agent or the bot should actually be more proactive to you than you reaching out to it. And I think that will be the next shift in AI.”

“And so there was about a two week period where we were in that mode and onboarded a couple of hundred people.”