Ryan is joined on the podcast by Confluent’s AI Entrepreneur in Residence, Sean Falconer, to discuss the growing need for standards for AI agents, the emerging Model Context Protocol and agent-to-agent communication, and what we can learn from early web standards while AI continues to evolve.
Ryan sits down with CTO Aruna Srivastava and CPO Ruslan Mukhamedvaleev from Koel Labs to talk about how they’re innovating speech technology with the help of AI and classic movies. They also tell Ryan about their time in the Mozilla Builders Accelerator and their experiences as student co-founders in an ever-changing economic and technological landscape.
Ryan welcomes Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the original "Attention Is All You Need" Transformers paper and co-founder of NEAR, on the show to talk about the development and impact of the Transformers model, his perspective on modern AI and machine learning as an early innovator of the tech, and the importance of decentralized, user-owned AI utilizing the blockchain.
Ryan welcomes Matt DeBergalis, CTO at Apollo GraphQL, to discuss the evolution and future of API orchestration, the benefits of GraphQL in managing API complexity, its seamless integration with AI and modern development stacks, and how it enhances developer experience through better tooling and infrastructure.
Positioned at the intersection of automation, decision intelligence, and data orchestration, AI agents are quickly emerging as essential tools for aligning business outcomes with technical workflows.
What challenges do organizations face when adopting AI, and why is understanding its limitations key to success?
We’re always trying to make it easy for users to pick out the information they need and gain insights into their processes, so a natural language interface seemed like a dream.
Ryan welcomes Jeu George, cofounder and CEO of Orkes, to the show for a conversation about microservices orchestration. They talk through the evolution of microservices, the role of orchestration tools, and the importance of reliability in distributed systems. Their discussion also touches on the transition from open-source solutions to managed services, integration opportunities for AI agents, and the future of microservices in cloud computing.
Is “agentic AI” just a buzzword, or is it the sea change it seems?
