Why AI Agents Need a New Data Stack

Deepti Srivastava, founder and CEO of Snow Leopard, joins us to discuss why AI agents need access to live enterprise data and why traditional approaches to data integration may not be enough. We explore how AI is making data federation and automatic semantic layer construction more practical, and the challenges of accuracy, governance, and reliability.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica talks with Chetan Conikee, founder of Modiqo and creator of Olki, about why existing tools often fall short when it comes to understanding what AI agents actually do. Chetan explains how Olki captures and classifies individual agent actions without relying on another LLM, providing detailed insights into costs, performance, and security. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica and investor Evangelos Simoudis discuss the opportunities and risks revealed in Anthropic’s S-1, from explosive revenue growth and improving economics to mounting compute commitments, competition from open-weight models, and dependence on coding. They also examine SpaceX’s emerging neocloud business and whether access to cheap capital and growing demand can sustain it. Finally, they debate proposals for regulating frontier AI labs, including restrictions on AI self-improvement, independent testing, and mandatory disclosure of security incidents.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica speaks with Leo de Moura, creator of Lean, VP and Distinguished Scientist at AWS, and Chief Architect of the Lean Focused Research Organization, about how AI is making formal verification more accessible and potentially transforming software engineering.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Akshay Sharma, ML Engineer at Lyft, and Nick Ung, Staff Applied Scientist at Lyft, explain how their team is building a platform that lets domain experts create customer-facing AI agents while engineers provide the underlying tools, guardrails, and evaluation infrastructure.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

MIT FutureTech director Neil Thompson joins Ben Lorica to discuss how AI is reshaping work, the economy, and the future of automation. Drawing on recent research, Thompson explains why AI’s impact on most occupations may unfold gradually rather than arrive as a sudden shock, why adoption continues to lag behind technical capabilities, and why the fixed costs of implementation favor larger firms.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

In this episode, we talk with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, about the company’s decision to develop its own frontier AI model, Thomson, using open-weight models and decades of proprietary content and expertise.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Piero Molino, CEO and co-founder of Studio Atelico, joins Ben Lorica to discuss what happens when AI becomes a core game mechanic rather than a cost-cutting tool.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica speaks with Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of Pathway, about the company’s push beyond transformers toward models that reason in latent space, learn from experience, and maintain state over long time horizons.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Richard Ho, VP of Hardware at OpenAI, explains how the team built Jalapeño, its first custom AI accelerator, and why controlling more of the hardware stack could lower inference costs and improve performance. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS.Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.