# Agents need infrastructure beyond a typical SaaS stack

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/agents-need-infrastructure-beyond-a-typical-saas-stack/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Marco Palladino](https://realalpha.app/builders/marco-palladino/) · Marco Palladino is cofounder and CTO of Kong. · Co-founded Kong and launched Volcano, an AI-native platform for building and running production AI agents.
- Host: [Theo Jaffee](https://realalpha.app/people/theo-jaffee/) · Co-founder & host, MTS · One of the first members of a16z's new media team; earlier hosted the Emergent Ventures-backed Theo Jaffee Podcast.
- Host: [Sophia Dew](https://realalpha.app/people/sophia-dew/) · Host, MTS
- Show: MTS
- Episode: [AI Agents Will Automate Entire Enterprise Orgs | Marco Palladino](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/), Oct 20, 2026
- Moment: 8:56 to 11:54 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/agents-need-infrastructure-beyond-a-typical-saas-stack/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=536

## Quote

> “I don't want to focus on **stitching together** like this mosaic of different services and platforms.”
> — [Marco Palladino](https://realalpha.app/builders/marco-palladino/) at [10:46](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=646) · MTS

## Takeaways

1. Branch production data to test agents safely.
2. Use human approvals and isolated sandboxes for risky actions.
3. A unified platform can reduce provider stitching.

## About this segment

Marco Palladino explains why agent apps need durable workflows, database branches, human approvals, and isolated sandboxes. Bundling those pieces lets developers focus on the outcome instead of stitching providers together.

From “AI Agents Will Automate Entire Enterprise Orgs | Marco Palladino”, Oct 20, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/)

## Transcript

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

[9:01](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=541) you're doing this directly at the core, you're getting these agents to work all across your business. How does it work right now? My assumption is that most developers, they're typically stitching together different types of providers, like you're sticking together a provider for compute or a database or auth or storage, all these different things. And so is that currently how it works? And then if so, why is that a problem? Well, so agents have fundamentally changed how we build applications. So any developer or any organization who's building agents the same way with the same mindset as, oh, I'm building a SaaS application where they're not going to go very far because there are some concepts that agents introduced that we didn't have in the past. The ability, for example, to your point, to run durable workflows, being able

[9:45](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=585) to branch the database so that we can test our agents with real data without actually impacting the data that's running in production, so effectively being able to create a copy of your main database and run it almost like a branch with the agents that we're building, the ability to have humans in the loops to either approve or deny important decisions that we don't want the agent to make, the ability to run untrusted user code into sandboxes that are fully isolated.

[10:13](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=613) So you see, there's lots of similarities, but there's also lots of new concepts that are needed. And so today, developers that are building agents are stitching together from different sources, different vendors, different providers, all these type of technologies. As a developer myself, I don't want to do that. I want to go to one place, being able to build an agent that can generate an outcome. Because again, remember, the outcome is the most important thing of this whole journey.

[10:37](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=637) It doesn't matter how many agents we build and how big and how cool they are. If we put a dollar in, how many dollars do we get out? Is the outcome greater than what we put in? And so as a developer building agents, I want to focus on that. I don't want to focus on stitching together like this mosaic of different services and platforms. And so Volcano was built as that, you know, one-stop shop, all batteries included.

[11:01](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=661) We have learned from ourselves. Kong builds lots of agents. We have learned from our customers. And we have put together a very compelling platform with a very compelling pricing point, by the way, because obviously this is not our core business. So we can do things on a pricing standpoint that others can't to really simplify and make it easier to go and build agents and finally transform with this new agentic world.

[11:24](https://realalpha.app/v/OXa_n3uuwnI/?t=684) And by the way, of course, Kong has lots of expertise with the enterprise, but Volcano is available to everyone. So every developer who's building any agent, whether it's in an enterprise organization or not, are welcome to go and sign up because it's free to get started and it's very intuitive. And you can, again, go straight from your coding harness to deploying the agent in production. The whole pipeline is already pre-built effectively in the experience of using Volcano.