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PODCAST

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Chain of Thought is the podcast where builders reason through what"s changing. Host Conor Bronsdon sits down with the engineers and founders shipping AI in production to get past the hype into what"s working and what isn"t. Episodes cover model infrastructure, inference, agent frameworks, evaluation, and developer tools. Guests have come from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, AMD, Databricks, Vercel, and more. Every episode carries a full

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All Episodes

56:45

Your Best AI Engineer Might Have the Worst Metrics |...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/10/05

Andrea Malagodi is CTO at Sonar, which builds AI code verification and governance tools. When finance asked about the size of his team's AI bills, he calculated cost per PR. At one extreme was an engineer with more than 500 PRs in a short period and a low cost per PR. At the other was an engineer with very high spend and very few PRs.Judged on cost alone, the first engineer wins and the second looks like a problem. Malagodi looked closer. The first had built a personal agent factory, with

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83:13

Why Context Alone Isn't Enough for Enterprise AI...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/09/24

An AI agent answering questions about your business needs to understand how that business works. How do you calculate churn? When does your fiscal year end? Who has the authority to change those definitions? Connecting a model to company data leaves those questions unresolved.That’s the work of context engineering: giving agents the business definitions, instructions and examples they need to interpret your data. But that context changes as the business evolves, and someone has to keep it

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56:27

AI Codes: Product Engineers Decide What to Build

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/09/22

Laurie Voss co-founded npm - now head of developer relations at Arize, he argues that engineers will increasingly earn their keep as 'product engineers': understanding what users need and directing AI agents to build it.One example: a bakery owner who knows how to make a croissant but has no interest in building software. Someone still has to turn that owner's needs into requirements. Laurie sees that work becoming central to product engineering, with cheaper code making software for

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61:37

Genspark's Bet: AI Agents Become the Users of Software

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/09/17

Genspark went from launch to $250 million in ARR in about a year. Along the way it shipped a card-thin meeting recorder, open sourced an office suite that Wen Sang says one engineer prototyped in a week, and started running product triage with agents instead of product managers.Wen's bet is that agents, not people, become the next users of software.Wen Sang is co-founder and COO of Genspark. In this episode he walks through the company's three-layer architecture (models, tools and premium

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52:45

Tuning GPU Performance with AI Agents | AMD’s Anush...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/09/09

Watch the full conversation on YouTubeAI agents can keep tuning GPU workloads after you step away from the keyboard. Anush Elangovan, Corporate VP of AI Software at AMD, returns to Chain of Thought to explain how that works with Hyperloom and ROCm 10.Anush and Conor Bronsdon trace the process from installing ROCm through Claude Code or Codex to profiling workloads, finding slow kernels, and testing optimizations while preserving numerical accuracy. Anush shares a Hyperloom run spanning

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54:45

Slack Wants to Be the Context Harness for Code | CPO...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/09/02

Jaime DeLanghe has spent nine years at Slack turning search, machine learning, and now agents into product. Her team just shipped Slack Code: tag a coding agent like Claude Code, Devin, Codex, or the GitHub agent in a conversation, and it spins up a code channel where everyone in that conversation gets a live development environment, diffs post as artifacts, and the channel winds down when the task is done.Slack's bet is that AI at work is multiplayer. Agents belong in the channels where

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54:51

11 Cameras, Dozens of Mics: The AI That Reads the Room

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/08/27

Tormod Ree puts 11 or more cameras and dozens of microphones into a single meeting room, then runs computer vision on all of it to figure out who is present, who is talking, and who is looking at whom. He is the chief product and engineering officer at Neat, the Zoom-backed video hardware company.Before Neat, Tormod co-founded AVA, a computer vision security company Motorola acquired, and spent close to eight years at Cisco running the Spark Board. He explains how Neat turns a room into a

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53:56

Thomson 1: The New $40M Legal AI Model | Thomson...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/08/24

Behind Thomson, the new legal AI model from Thomson Reuters, is a $40 million investment in people, compute, and evaluation methods. The final training run cost just $450,000. CTO Joel Hron, whose teams build Westlaw, Practical Law, and CoCounsel for millions of professionals in more than 100 countries, joined us for the launch to break down why the 175-year-old company chose to own its model layer instead of solely renting frontier intelligence.We cover:Why Thomson Reuters trained its own

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47:11

Time to Exploit is Negative: AI Broke the Patch Cycle...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/08/19

Attackers used to take months, sometimes 270 days, to weaponize a disclosed vulnerability. Now it happens in weeks, minutes if the incentive is there, and independent reports from Mandiant and CrowdStrike show the average time to exploit has gone negative.Dan Lorenc's conclusion: finding flaws is no longer the hard part. Fixing them first is.Dan is the co-founder and CEO of Chainguard. Before that he spent years at Google building the backbone of software supply chain security and created

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46:10

Parenting Your AI Agents for Best Results | Cisco's...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/08/12

Agents are like teenagers: profoundly intelligent, extremely resourceful, no fear of consequence, and missing the judgment to know right from wrong at all times. That's how Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel thinks about securing AI agents, and it's why he says static allow/block rules are already obsolete. Agents are smart enough to route around them.Jeetu returns to Chain of Thought to map cyber's third phase: an agent trust platform where security and observability

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52:42

Data Federation, Not Centralization, Is What...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/07/16

Jitender Aswani was customer zero for Presto at Meta, where a billion daily active users generated queries that took hours to return. He watched that drop to minutes, scaled the same technology at Netflix across 300 million subscribers, and now runs engineering and security at Starburst, the $3.35 billion platform built on Trino.His argument: every enterprise AI project that stalls is fighting the same hidden battle. The agents can query the model fine. They just can't reach the data. The

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52:46

You Can't Secure an AI Agent with Software

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/07/01

Charles Guillemet is CTO of Ledger and the founder of the Donjon, Ledger's internal offensive security lab whose job is to break the company's own products before attackers do. He spent a decade in cryptography and hardware security before Ledger, including designing secure integrated circuits.His argument is blunt: you cannot secure an AI agent with software alone. As agents start moving real money, API keys and trust scopes leave no physical verification layer, and Charles makes the case

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57:35

Stop Token Maxxing: Find Where AI Actually Pays Off |...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/06/25

Jiaona Zhang(JZ) is the Chief Product Officer at Laurel, where the team runs its own product on itself to see exactly where AI helps and where it doesn't. Before Laurel, JZ built products at Airbnb, Dropbox, Webflow, and Linktree, and she has taught product management at Stanford for nearly a decade.Companies are spending billions on AI tooling, but most still can't say where it returns time or revenue. Jiaona breaks down how to get that visibility, why blanket AI mandates backfire, and

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54:44

Most of the Web Will Never Get APIs for AI Agents |...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/06/18

Most of the web will never get APIs for AI agents. School district sites, small business pages, government offices, and the long tail of e-commerce were built for humans, and they will keep working that way for years. So how do agents actually get things done across the web?Dhruv Batra is co-founder and chief scientist of Yutori, the company building specialized browser and computer-use agents. He previously led embodied AI at Meta's FAIR lab, training robots in simulation and shipping the

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45:36

The First Fully Autonomous AI Attack Is 18 Months...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/06/11

Kristin "Kris" Lovejoy has spent her career inside the systems the global economy runs on: banks, hospitals, energy grids, governments. Today she is Global Head of Strategy at Kyndryl, the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider, working with mission-critical enterprises across more than 60 countries. Before that she ran security businesses at EY and IBM, founded the AI security company BluVector (acquired by Comcast), and now sits on the board of Dominion Energy.Her prediction:

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52:42

The AI Framework Era Is Over: Why Context Is the Moat...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/06/03

Jerry Liu built one of the most installed pieces of AI plumbing of the last three years. LlamaIndex became the indexing and retrieval layer a whole generation of RAG apps were stitched together with. Then he started arguing that the framework era he helped create is over.Jerry is co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex. In this conversation he walks through the company's pivot from open-source framework to managed document infrastructure with LlamaCloud and LlamaParse, and why he is betting that

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50:50

We Built Agents, Nobody Built HR | Tyler Akidau, Red...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/05/27

Tyler Akidau spent 12 years on streaming systems at Google and five years at Snowflake before joining Red Panda as CTO. He wrote the O'Reilly Streaming Systems book most of the field has on its shelf. His new piece on O'Reilly Radar (Post-Human: We All Built Agents, Nobody Built HR) argues that enterprises are stuck in the prototype-to-production gap because they're applying human-era identity, auth, and observability tools to a workforce that's unpredictable in structurally novel ways,

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50:11

How Superhuman Built AI Into a 100ms Product | Loïc...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/05/22

Loïc Houssier leads engineering at Superhuman, the email client Grammarly acquired for ~$825 million in July 2025. Before Superhuman he was CTO of OpenTrust (acquired by DocuSign), ran engineering at ProductBoard, and started his career in applied cryptography for France's defense industry, including work on nuclear submarine systems. Loïc joined Superhuman in early 2024 and within 30 days was leading a six-week sprint to ship AI Inbox.Superhuman's brand is built on speed: every interaction

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57:07

The AI Hiring Doom Loop: Applications Up 239%, Hires...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/05/06

Job applications are up 239% since ChatGPT launched, tech layoffs show no signs of slowing down, and the market for technical talent is a topsy turvy mess. Greenhouse has a unique vantage point to understand all of this: they process 22 million job applications a month across 7,500+ companies including HubSpot, Anthropic, Coinbase, and the NFL. CEO Daniel Chait has had a front-row seat to the strangest hiring market in decades, and he's here to advise us all on how to navigate it.Daniel

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42:40

Every AI Agent Has an Evaluation Gap | Alex Ratner,...

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure &... ·

2026/04/29

Alex Ratner co-founded Snorkel AI out of Chris Ré's Stanford lab and helped establish data-centric AI as a field. Today, Snorkel is a $1.3B company shipping thousands of data sets and environments a week to frontier labs and vertical AI teams like Harvey.In this conversation, he argues our ability to build AI agents has outpaced our ability to measure them. That gap is what's keeping most enterprise agents stuck in demo purgatory.If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And you can't

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