Beyond The Pilot: Enterprise AI in Action

Enterprise GPU hoarding is over. LinkedIn CTO Erran Berger and VentureBeat analyst Rob Strechay break down what comes next — and the infrastructure math most enterprises are only now being forced to confront. VentureBeat's Q1 research shows GPU availability anxiety dropped from 20.8% to 15.4% among enterprise teams, while cost-per-inference and TCO concerns jumped from 34% to 41% — a number that's still climbing. The hoarding phase is giving way to an audit phase, and the companies that didn't build the instrumentation to understand their workloads are now paying for it. Erran Berger explains how LinkedIn runs one of the few rema...

The CEO who built one of the most-starred RAG frameworks on GitHub (47,000 stars) just publicly declared that frameworks like his are becoming obsolete — and then pivoted his entire company around that conclusion. Jerry Liu, CEO and co-founder of LlamaIndex, joins Matt Marshall and Sam Witteveen to explain exactly what broke in the AI stack, why 95% of his team's code is now AI-generated, and where the real defensibility in enterprise AI infrastructure actually lives in 2026. The conversation covers the specific architectural shift that made RAG orchestration frameworks less central: agent reasoning has improved to the point wh...

Cisco's OutShift deployed a multi-agent network configuration system that raised error detection from 10–15% to 100% and cut full change validation from 2–3 weeks to 6–7 minutes. The reason it worked — and why most enterprise multi-agent deployments still fail — comes down to a single gap nobody is talking about: agents can connect, but they cannot think together. Vijoy Pandey, SVP and General Manager of OutShift by Cisco, joins Matt and Sam to explain why A2A, MCP, and existing agent protocols solve connectivity but leave out an entire layer: shared cognition. OutShift's research identifies this as a missing "Layer 9" — a semantic and cognitiv...

A QuickBooks customer discovered significant fraud by asking their AI assistant follow-up questions about transaction amounts that didn't add up. This isn't a demo — it's one of 3 million customers now using Intuit's AI agents in production, with 80.5% returning to use them again. Marianna Tessel, EVP and GM of QuickBooks (formerly CTO of Intuit), walks through the architecture decisions behind one of the first enterprise AI deployments at true scale. Intuit's "done-for-you" agents now automate book closing, reconciliation, transaction categorization, and payroll — but the breakthrough came when they realized chatbots alone weren't enough. Businesses wanted human experts integrated dire...

Major SaaS companies including Salesforce, Intuit, and ServiceNow saw stock drops of 45-50% as enterprises shift from bloated software suites to personalized AI agents that users can control directly. Microsoft just capitulated this week, opening Copilot to allow Claude Cowork-style functionality — a clear signal that the "build vs. buy" calculus for enterprise software has fundamentally changed. Matt Marshall and Sam Witteveen break down why personalization is no longer optional for enterprise products. Companies like Zoom now offer personalized workflows that access your conversation history and profile context. Infrastructure decisions are moving fast: token budgets must account for pe...

LangChain told employees they cannot install OpenClaw on company laptops due to "massive security risk" — yet this unhinged approach is exactly what makes it work. Harrison Chase unpacks why OpenClaw succeeds where AutoGPT failed, and why context engineering, not just smarter models, separates demo agents from production-ready systems. The shift is architectural: Modern agent harnesses like Claude Code now dump 40,000-token API responses to file systems instead of cramming them into message history. LangChain's Deep Agents framework emerged from reverse-engineering Claude Code, Codex, and Deep Research — discovering they all use planning via to-do lists, subagents for focused work...

On February 2nd, a single plugin wiped nearly $800 billion off the enterprise software market. Wall Street is terrified that AI agents are about to eat the legal industry's lunch. But LexisNexis isn't scared—they're building the moat. In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Min Chen (Chief AI Officer, LexisNexis) reveals the sophisticated architecture they built to counter the "LLM wrapper" revolution. Moving beyond standard RAG, Min breaks down their move to "GraphRAG", their deployment of Agentic workflows (using Planner and Reflection agents), and why they created a proprietary "Usefulness Score" because standard accuracy me...

While most of the world is still running GenAI pilots, Mastercard is running AI inference on 160 billion transactions a year—with a hard latency limit of 50 milliseconds per score. In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Johan Gerber (EVP of Security Solutions) and Chris Merz (SVP of Data Science) open the hood on one of the world's largest production AI systems: Decision Intelligence Pro. They reveal how they moved beyond legacy rules engines to build Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that act as "inverse recommenders"—predicting legitimate behavior faster than the blink of an eye. AI Gets...

While the rest of the industry chases massive models, LinkedIn quietly achieved a major engineering breakthrough by going small. In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Erran Berger (VP of Product Engineering, LinkedIn) opens the "cookbook" on how they distilled massive 7B parameter models down to ultra-efficient 600M parameter "student" models—scaling AI to 1.2 billion users without breaking the bank. AI Gets Real Here. This isn't theory. Erran details the exact architecture, the "Multi-Teacher" distillation process, and the organizational shift that forced Product Managers to write evals instead of specs. In this episode, we...

The "TAM" for AI Agents isn't software. And there is a $10 Trillion opportunity. In this episode, Replit CEO Amjad Masad reveals why 99% of today's enterprise AI agents are just "Slop"—unreliable, generic toys that fail in production. We dive deep into the engineering reality of building autonomous agents that actually work, moving beyond simple chatbots to systems that can navigate the messy reality of enterprise infrastructure. Amjad breaks down Replit’s "Computer Use" hack that makes agents 10x cheaper than generic models, explains why "Vibe Coding" is the future of the C-Suite, and issues a warn...

Inside the 'Agent Economy': How 30,000 AI Assistants Took Over JPMorgan While most enterprises were scrambling after ChatGPT launched, JPMorgan Chase was already two years ahead. 🚀 In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, we sit down with Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase, to reveal how the world’s largest bank built an internal AI platform that is now used by 1 in 2 employees daily. Derek shares the contrarian insight that drove their strategy: AI models are commodities; the real moat is connectivity. Learn how they scaled from zero to 250,000+ users, why t...

We built AI agents by accident... and it worked. 🤯 In this episode of VentureBeat’s Beyond the Pilot, we go inside the engineering brain of Booking.com with Pranav Pathak (Director of Product Machine Learning). Pranav reveals how they "stumbled" into agentic architectures before the term even existed, how a simple text box revealed a massive missed revenue opportunity (the "Hot Tub" story), and exactly how they stack LLMs, RAG, and Orchestrators to handle millions of travelers without breaking the bank. If you are building Enterprise AI, this is the blueprint for moving from "cool demo"...

In our inaugural episode, we sit down with Ryan Nystrom, leader of the AI team at Notion, to pull back the curtain on Notion 3.0. Ryan reveals the journey of integrating powerful AI agents into the productivity platform and draws fascinating parallels between the current AI era and the mobile revolution he witnessed at Instagram. He shares exclusive insights into the development challenges, the critical role of tools, context, and curation, and how custom agents are poised to reshape work. Plus, Ryan offers essential advice for any company diving into the AI space. Learn more about...

Lift-and-shift isn’t enough. MongoDB’s Vinod Bagal breaks down how to modernize your data for AI — and why waiting could cost you your competitive edge. Host: Sean Michael Kerner Guest: Vinod Bagal For more stories visit venturebeat.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI is accelerating the cyber arms race — and former FBI agents Paul Bingham and Mike Morris say most enterprises aren’t ready. In this VB in Conversation, they break down the real-world threats targeting critical infrastructure, how AI is changing the attack surface, and why smart, layered defense starts with training the next-gen cyber workforce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Key Insights and Takeaways from VentureBeat Transform Event: AI and Enterprise Innovation In this episode, Matt and Sam recount their experiences and insights from the recent VentureBeat Transform event, an annual gathering focused on enterprise AI. They discuss the significant takeaways, including the increasing adoption of AI agents in production, the lack of dominance by any single hyperscaler in the AI model space, the focus on practical AI solutions over super-intelligence hype, and the evolving structure of teams in the AI-driven workplace. Highlights include insights from speakers at major companies like American Express, Google, IBM, and Zoom, as well...

Visa’s SVP of Data & AI, Sam Hamilton, joins VentureBeat to break down the hidden costs, trade-offs, and infrastructure realities behind running over 400 AI solutions incorporating 300 AI models at global scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Google Cloud Next: In-Depth Discussion with Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter Join us for an exclusive interview with Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist of Google Cloud, as he discusses the latest developments and insights from Google Cloud Next. Dive into conversations about AI advancements, the new agent development kit, and the multi-agent protocol, and how they are reshaping the future of cloud services and enterprise solutions. Learn about the balance between pre-built and custom agents, and Google's commitment to open-source and multi-cloud flexibility. Don't miss out on this insider look at the cutting edge of AI and cloud technology. 00:00 Introduction and...

Cisco’s Anurag Dhingra joins VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall to unpack what it means to build a truly AI-ready network. From smart switching to agentic operations, Dhingra explains how enterprises must stay ahead of surging network demands — and why network intelligence is now foundational to scaling AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exploring Napkin.ai: Revolutionizing Graphic Design with AI Agents Join Matt Marshall, founder and CEO of VentureBeat, and Sam Witteveen as they interview Pramod Sharma, CEO of Napkin.ai, and co-founder Jerome Scholler, about their innovative AI-powered graphic design tool. Discover how Napkin.ai has rapidly grown to 2 million beta users with its unique ability to transform text into compelling graphics effortlessly. Learn about the sophisticated backend structure involving multiple specialized AI agents and the recently introduced custom styles feature that allows users and companies to define and perfect their graphic outputs. Perfect for anyone interested in the future...