17 tech executives reveal how AI agents are changing work and hiring
Conversation at AI Insider's dinner roundtable in San Francisco JY Studios A version of this story originally appeared in the AI Insider newsletter.
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This week, AI Insider hosted a dinner, sponsored by Dash0, in San Francisco for tech executives.
I started with a simple question.
"Who had an AI agent help them at work today?" Every hand went up.
Then I asked a follow-up.
"Who had more than five AI agents helping them at work today?" Again, every hand stayed in the air.
Around the table were Zoom CTO XD Huang; Figma VP of Engineering Josh Clemm; Coursera CTO Mustafa Furniturewala; ServiceNow executive Ashraf Karim; Glean CTO T.R.
"Vish" Vishwanath; Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann ; PagerDuty engineering leader Manu Gurudatha; Yahoo Mail GM Kyle Miller; Lime CTO Jon Jenkins; Proofpoint AI security chief Ravi Ithal; Temporal cofounder and CTO Maxim Fateev; Inworld CEO Kylan Gibbs ; Xero engineering leader Diya Jolly; MinIO CTO Ugur Tigli; Tribe AI partner Pooja Brown; Basis cofounder Creston Brooks; and Empirik CEO Kartik Chandrayana.
No one debated whether AI will kill us.
These are experienced tech leaders from the trenches wrestling with real questions, such as: How do you make AI agents actually useful inside a company? Context One phrase kept coming up all evening: context.
Zoom's Huang said AI agents won't become genuinely useful until they understand far more about your company, your colleagues, your meetings, and your work.
"Context is all you need," XD quipped, riffing on the famous AI research paper " Attention is All You Need ." Glean's Vishwanath agreed.
He said AI agents often fail because they're connected to too little information — or worse, the wrong information.
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