Real Alpha has cut 5 moments of Alex Lieberman (Co-founder & Managing Partner, Tenex) talking, from an interview on Latent Space published Oct 21, 2026.
What Alex Lieberman said
Only 5% of large enterprises run non-engineering agents
“agents in production for non-engineering work drops to like 5”
Alex Lieberman21:12 Rebuilding SaaS depends on value and maintenance burden
“It is all of the headaches you don't have to think about in maintaining it and improving it when it's not in your core.”
Alex Lieberman33:11 Output-based pay still has to account for non-coding work
“And I would say those two concerns have not been concerns at all because of our AI strategists.”
Alex Lieberman5:56 Tenex's token spend is roughly one to two times employee spend
“I'd say we're somewhere between, if we're talking like raw tokens, somewhere between 1 to 1 and maybe like 2 to 1.”
Alex Lieberman15:15 Vertical AI agents face a hard path to software margins
“there is so much nuance and so much inertia. And so like so many systems you have to wrangle and people you have to wrangle.”
Alex Lieberman24:53
Also from this interview
AI job changes demand action from employers and workers
“people are going to be put out of jobs because a lot of people don't have the luxury of liking or not liking a job.”
Shawn Wang (swyx)37:38
The episode
Latent SpaceAI in NYC: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native Engineering Team — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess
Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess · Tenex
19:23of 43:33 · Oct 21
Is this you? Add the badge to your site.
