Agentic transformation starts with choosing what to automate

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 50:25

   when i tried to mentor a product that you described with the builder experience i was struck by a couple things one was just and i'm interested in your kind of take on what is the value of very early aggressive experimentation because one thing that has been true for me over and over again is i strive i toil i sweat to finally make something work and then the next model generation or certainly two model generations later, it's that suddenly easy, right? So even building something like mentor two generations ago, probably pretty tough, right? To get it to work, to get it to be semi-reliable, et cetera, et cetera. Now you could put five, five or Astra on it and probably build something very similar to what you have in whatever, 10% of the time or even less. When you think about like strategically, what organizations should be doing, how do you

2. 51:20

   separate spinning your wheels and just churning on stuff that will soon be easy from waiting? How do you know what things you really want to attack early and where maybe a little patience actually could be a virtue? Yeah. Okay. Good question. Lots to talk about there. Certainly, like the build of Mentor has been a big lift, right? Absolutely. We began this effort in 2018 before I was with the company and obviously the state of technology was all machine learning at the time. There was no generative AI. It was back. The question was, how do you use AI or machine learning AI in every phase of the software development lifecycle to speed things up and make quality better and everything? That, of course, the project has evolved a ton over that time to the point where now, you know, Mentor is really a set of MCP services that can be consumed

3. 52:15

   anywhere to build software reliably that always meets all of your non-functional requirements and helps you stick with your compliance goals and all those things. So, like, it's been a huge transformation. The models we've used under the covers change all the time as we optimize for cost, as we talked about earlier. The problem that most of our customers still face today, And honestly, this is not a dramatic shift from previously, but capability is better.

4. 52:43

   People can do more faster. But the real question is like, what should I build to actually solve problems in my business to take advantage of opportunities in my business? Like what to do is still the hardest question, right? So how much should I play around and experiment and try? I would say a lot of that effort should probably be going into where can I get the biggest bang for my buck? Where do I, where?

5. 53:07

   What business process does it make sense for me to transform into something agentic? We've learned the hard way on this with our existing customers. You know, we've got portfolios of thousands of applications today. So what we did is we built an AI that says, tell the customers what agentic system they should create over top of the assets that they already run on our platform. And we've just launched a brand new capability.

6. 53:34

   It's currently in the hands of our customer success teams, which is an agent that simply tells you what to build and forecasts for you the ROI in terms of time savings. We use all the telemetry data from the apps that you've built. We understand the structure of what you're doing. We see the data flow through those. We reason over that, and we say, hey, you might want to think about an agent here for taking this manual job and turning it into an automated one.

7. 54:02

   And by the way, press this button to build it and let the AI actually go build a V1 of that that you can then run through, of course, your development, testing, validation process and try it out. And so, like solving the problem of what to do is like a huge part of the challenge for most organizations trying to get there in terms of an agentic transformation of their business.