Building AI Agents for the Enterprise: Realistic Use Cases, Cost Controls, Seamless UX | ep 15

In this episode, Nicolay talks with Rahul Parundekar, founder of AI Hero, about the current state and future of AI agents. Drawing from over a decade of experience working on agent technology at companies like Toyota, Rahul emphasizes the importance of focusing on realistic, bounded use cases rather than chasing full autonomy. They dive into the key challenges, like effectively capturing expert workflows and decision processes, delivering seamless user experiences that integrate into existing routines, and managing costs through techniques like guardrails and optimized model choices. The conversation also explores potential new paradigms for agent interactions beyond just chat. Key Takeaways: Agents need to focus on realistic use cases rather than trying to be fully autonomous. Enterprises are unlikely to allow agents full autonomy anytime soon. Capturing the logic and workflows in the user's head is the key challenge. Shadowing experts and having them demonstrate workflows is more effective than asking them to document processes. User experience is crucial - agents must integrate seamlessly into existing user workflows without major disruptions. Interfaces beyond just chat may be needed. Cost control is important - techniques like guardrails, context windowing, model choice optimization, and dev vs production modes can help manage costs. New paradigms beyond just chat could be powerful - e.g. workflow specification, state/declarative definition of desired end-state. Prompt engineering and dynamic prompt improvement based on feedback remain an open challenge. Key Quotes: "Empowering users to create their own workflows is essential for effective agent usage." "Capturing workflows accurately is a significant challenge in agent development." "Preferences, right? So a lot of the work becomes like, hey, can you do preference learning for this user so that the next time the user doesn't have to enter the same information again, things like that." Rahul Parundekar: AI Hero AI Hero Docs Nicolay Gerold: ⁠LinkedIn⁠ ⁠X (Twitter) 00:00 Exploring the Potential of Autonomous Agents 02:23 Challenges of Accuracy and Repeatability in Agents 08:31 Capturing User Workflows and Improving Prompts 13:37 Tech Stack for Implementing Agents in the Enterprise agent development, determinism, user experience, agent paradigms, private use, human-agent interaction, user workflows, agent deployment, human-in-the-loop, LLMs, declarative ways, scalability, AI Hero