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.
Douwe Kiela, CEO and cofounder of Contextual AI, joins Ryan and Ben to explore the intricacies of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). They discuss the early research Douwe did at Meta that jump started the whole thing, the challenges of hallucinations, and the significance of context windows in AI applications.
Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, tells Eira and Ben about building the new Salesforce Developer Edition, which includes access to the company’s agentic AI platform, Agentforce. Christophe explains how they solicited and incorporated feedback from the developer community in building the developer edition, what types of AI agents people are building, and the critical importance of guardrails and prompt engineering.
Maryam Ashoori, Head of Product for watsonx.ai at IBM, joins Ryan and Eira to talk about the complexity of enterprise AI, the role of governance, the AI skill gap among developers, how AI coding tools impact developer productivity, what chain-of-thought reasoning entails, and what observability and monitoring look like for AI.
Ben Popper chats with CTO Abby Kearns about how Alembic is using composite AI and lessons learned from contract tracing and epidemiology to help companies map customer journeys and understand the ROI of their marketing spend. Ben and Abby also talk about where open-source models have the edge and the challenges startups face in building trust with big companies and securing the resources they need to grow.
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.
At HumanX 2025, Ryan chatted with Rodrigo Liang, cofounder and CEO of SambaNova, about reimagining 30-year-old hardware architecture for the AI era.
Ryan talks with Greg Fallon, CEO of Geminus, about the intersection of AI and physical infrastructure, the evolution of simulation technology, the role of synthetic data in machine learning, and the importance of building trust in AI systems. Their conversation also touches on automation, security concerns inherent in AI-driven infrastructure, and AI’s potential to revolutionize how complex infrastructure systems are managed.
Today’s episode is a roundup of spontaneous, on-the-ground conversations from HumanX 2025, featuring guests from CodeConductor, DDN, Cloudflare, and Galileo.
Is “agentic AI” just a buzzword, or is it the sea change it seems?
In today’s episode, Ryan sits down with Richard “Spencer” Schaefer, cofounder and CTO of Lunar Analytics and a federal AI officer, and Caroline Zhang, cofounder and CTO of Knowtex, which provides AI-powered voice technology to automate workflows. They talk about safeguarding patient privacy, how AI changes doctor-patient interactions and healthcare delivery, the challenges inherent in rolling out AI technology, and the importance of quality data to fuel AI initiatives. Also included: a chat with Jeff Berkowitz, cofounder and CEO of Delve Deep Learning.
Ryan chats with Amr Awadallah, founder and CEO of GenAI platform Vectara about how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has advanced, why fact-checking and accurate data are essential in building AI applications, and how Vectara’s Mockingbird model seeks to minimize hallucinations.
Ryan welcomes Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures back to the podcast to talk about the intersection of AI and venture capital, the implications of AI on the labor market, and the future of AI applications.
At HumanX 2025, Ryan sat down with HumanX CEO Stefan Weitz and Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell to talk about where the money is in the AI space, where most enterprise AI strategies fall short, how companies can build business models when AI tech is evolving so quickly, and why this is AI’s microservices moment.
Two interviews for the price of one, direct from HumanX 2025! Ryan sits down with Raj Patel, AI transformation lead at Holistic AI, and then chats with Audioshake cofounder and CEO Jessica Powell.
Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS, helps Ryan break down the hype around agentic AI in software development. They cover the definition and real-world functionality of AI agents, how developers can integrate them into existing workflows, and the importance of establishing guardrails to ensure trust and security in agentic AI.
Ryan speaks with Edo Liberty, Founder and CEO of Pinecone, about building vector databases, the power of embeddings, the evolution of RAG, and fine-tuning AI models.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar sat down with Ryan at HumanX 2025 to talk about how Stack is integrating AI into its public platform, the enormous importance of a high-quality knowledge base in your AI journey, how AI tools are empowering junior developers to build better software, and much more.
Tillman Elser, AI/ML lead at Sentry, joins Ryan for a conversation about improving error monitoring with AI and ML. They talk through the challenges of analyzing stack traces, the innovative use of embeddings to improve error grouping, the trial-and-error process of developing algorithms, and where Sentry’s AI capabilities are headed next.
Some high-level takeaways, with more to come.
Lisbeth Kaufman, Head of Climate Tech at AWS, sits down with Ryan to talk about her work helping climate tech startups get off the ground and the role startups can play in addressing the climate change crisis. She highlights a few projects to get excited about, including ones focused on fusion energy and sustainable agriculture.
Ryan welcomes Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp, to the show to talk about reimagining the terminal. They also discuss why Warp was built in Rust (“it’s definitely harder”), how AI is transforming developer tools, and what Zach (formerly a principal engineer at Google) learned building Docs and Sheets.
More developers are sandwiched between caring for kids and older relatives. What does this mean for them and for the industry as a whole?
Jeremy “Jezz” Kellway, VP of Engineering for Analytics and Data & AI at EDB (Enterprise Database), joins Ryan for a conversation about Postgres and AI. They unpack how Postgres is becoming the standard database for AI applications, the importance of managing unstructured data, and the implications of data sovereignty and governance in AI.
