Ask Any C-Suite This One Question About Their AI Agents
About this episode
An AI assistant on his own sales team emailed a customer after being told never to send email. Hector Hernandez, co-founder and COO of Speakeasy, builds the guardrail layer that decides what AI agents are allowed to touch. He explains why most companies hand agents the keys to everything and what breaks first going from a handful of agents to hundreds.
Key moments
- 0:00 The AI assistant that emailed a customer anyway
- 1:24 Meet Hector Hernandez, co-founder of Speakeasy
- 2:03 How do you find a problem people will pay to solve?
- 5:42 Would you give 500 new hires the keys to everything?
- 7:10 What happened when their own AI assistant went off script?
- 10:51 Whose identity does an AI agent act under?
- 12:13 Who is accountable when an agent deletes your records?
- 19:50 Who is responsible for a company's AI agents?
- 22:24 What breaks first when you scale AI agents?
- 28:55 Are you rubber-stamping every AI permission request?
- 33:30 Should you build your own AI guardrails or buy them?
- 36:06 How do you find your first 10 customers?
- 39:00 How do you hire your first five employees?
- 43:55 Has AI changed how big a team needs to be?
- 47:01 Career advice for engineers: go meet people
- 50:03 Is he optimistic or pessimistic about AI?
- 51:11 The book he recommends
- 52:15 outro