“It turns out that agents just like dial up all your failure modes. It just multiplies the amplitude of problems you can get…”
How I AI · AI Builders · September 2026
Context
Krishnamurthy is describing what happened when Stripe pointed internal agents at its own data and infrastructure. He is not warning about a hypothetical: in the same answer he says agents went rogue and nearly took down core systems before the team caught it. His point to Claire Vo is that agents do not introduce new categories of weakness, they find the ones already there faster.
Transcript
…were made for humans, but have held up really well for agents because terms are the reasoning through it, agents have the same problem. They can answer the question, but they have no idea if it was the right query or the right table. And these investments have paid off in helping guard that.
…hardening investment, performance investment, not sexy, not what people are thinking about when you're building these data agents, but actually allow agents to do a really effective job because you don't worry about like, you know, turning over your data warehouse because an agent is hammering it.
…yet, right? But thinking about how do we say that, you know, this is an agent and this is what it's trying to do. Like what is the use case it's trying to use as it goes around doing its thing in our infrastructure and using this. That as a way to think about priorities and load shedding and all of that good stuff. Again, not super sexy, very like deep infra stuff, but the same principles apply. It turns out that agents just like dial up all your failure modes. It just multiplies the amplitude of problems you can get, right? And the investments, I wouldn't claim that we did not have any issues. We definitely had a bunch of issues where when we started doing this, like there were agents that went rogue. There were agents that may have almost taken down core systems, but we caught it in time. And now we've hardened those systems as well.
I love it. Okay, so we've yapped while Kai ran. Let's show what Kai actually generated using these skills and tools in Sandbox.
Yeah, of course. So here's what you see. You see that, you know, Kai adoption is looking good. And this is something I'm personally super happy about. Like pretty much everyone at Strike uses Kai, like 86 plus percent of the company now. So really AI for everyone, which is how we started out this…
it, right? I don't know a single marketing person that doesn't either want some sort of app built or some sort of dashboard. You have product market fit. That leads me to my next question, which is: how do you roll out? I'm just curious, kind of, you know, inside inside the doors of Stripe, how do…
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