Stripe built a company brain: Meet Kai
Claire Vo talks with Sharadh Krishnamurthy, an engineering manager at Stripe, about Kai, Stripe's internal company agent. He argues that rolling out AI to everyone at a big company depends more on governance than on the AI itself.
The gist
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Krishnamurthy says Kai knows your place in the org chart and your projects, and each person chooses whether to connect Google Drive and Slack.
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Projects work as a governance layer: an owner sets default models, tool policies and human approval steps, like extra safeguards for the HR team.
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Kai's data skill checks existing reports first, then the analytics layer, then the data catalog, and Krishnamurthy says warehouses must withstand agents brute-forcing queries.
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One and a half engineers built the first version in two weeks, and fewer than 10 people now run it for over 10,000 weekly users.
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Users can turn a session into a reusable skill, and Stripe's roughly 2,000 skills get automatic suggestions for improving them.
What they recommend · 1 pick
Gemini
AI tools
"It's helped me not sound super dumb to my six-year-old who's asking me all these complex questions about exoplanets and galaxies far away. I'm on the side, Gemini on my phone, l..."
Also mentioned
4:10
Kai
· "Kai is context aware. It knows who you are and what you do at the company. It knows what your colleagues..."
6:23
Google Drive
· "It lets you connect, if you choose to let it, to your Google Drive, to your Slack, to private messages —..."
6:23
Slack
· "It lets you connect, if you choose to let it, to your Google Drive, to your Slack, to private messages —..."
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