Ai agents

AI in GTM at Notion — Flora Liu

AI in GTM at Notion — Flora Liu

Flora Liu from Notion's GTM engineering team discusses transforming a fragmented Go-to-Market system into a unified, agent-driven platform. She details how Notion tackles challenges like dispersed customer data and unstructured insights by building a four-layered architecture (Know, Decide, Act, Learn) where humans and AI agents operate on the same substrate, leveraging Snowflake, DynamoDB, and Notion itself to create durable, self-improving workflows and boost sales and marketing effectiveness.

The Missing Layer in Agentic AI — Giedrius Šteimantas, Oxylabs

The Missing Layer in Agentic AI — Giedrius Šteimantas, Oxylabs

Giedrius Šteimantas discusses the often-overlooked infrastructural layer for AI agents operating on the open web. He highlights how traditional browser automation leads to high costs and unreliability, particularly due to CAPTCHAs and invalid content. Drawing from ten years of web scraping experience at Oxylabs, he presents a multi-stage solution that prioritizes cost-efficiency and content validation, using specialized APIs and hardened headless browsers only when absolutely necessary, thus significantly reducing token waste and improving agent performance.

Einstein Arena: Harnessing Collective Agent Intelligence for Open Science — James Zou, Together AI

Einstein Arena: Harnessing Collective Agent Intelligence for Open Science — James Zou, Together AI

James Zou presents a novel approach to AI development by advocating for the design of environments over workflows, fostering emergent intelligence and creativity. He introduces the **Einstein Arena**, where AI agents collaboratively and competitively solved open scientific problems like the kissing number problem, achieving breakthrough results (e.g., 604 spheres in 11 dimensions). The same principles successfully optimized GPU kernels, leading to 2x+ speedups. He also discusses **DSGym**, an environment for data science agents, addressing shortcomings of existing benchmarks by eliminating 'shortcuts' and enabling the training of high-performing, fine-tuned open-source models runnable on laptops.

Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents

Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents

Parag Agrawal, CEO of Parallel Web Systems, outlines his vision for an agent-centric web where AI agents query the internet 1000x more than humans. He details how Parallel is reinventing search infrastructure, dismissing human click data as a "bug," and tackling the economic crisis of the ad-supported internet with a novel monetization model based on Shapley values to pay content creators.

The 12 KB File That Replaces Weeks of Training (with Tristan Handy)

The 12 KB File That Replaces Weeks of Training (with Tristan Handy)

Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, details the evolution of analytics engineering from a 2016 study into a tool used by over 100,000 data teams. He explains his decision to use SQL over Spark for accessibility, the concept of "progressive complexity," and how dbt projects transform raw data into modeled tables using a Directed Acyclic Graph. Handy elaborates on the critical role of the semantic layer in ensuring consistent metric definitions for both human users and AI agents, especially in large organizations. He introduces the dbt Fusion Engine, aiming to bring type safety and universal SQL understanding, and discusses how 12-kilobyte skill files can revolutionize large-scale dbt migrations, reducing them from years to weeks by enabling AI agents to absorb vast amounts of expert knowledge.

The Agent Behind the Curtain: Building the Oz Cloud Agent Platform — Safia Abdalla, Warp

The Agent Behind the Curtain: Building the Oz Cloud Agent Platform — Safia Abdalla, Warp

Safia Abdalla discusses Warp's cloud agent platform, emphasizing its core principle of absorbing complexity from the user. She details features like flexible sandboxes, multi-harness support, and API-driven agent orchestration. The talk highlights how agents manage Warp's open-source repository—from issue triage to PR review—and introduces the "potter's workshop" analogy as a superior model to the "software factory" for modern, human-centric software development.