Gil Feig, co-founder and CTO of Merge, explains why agents need a company-wide context graph rather than a few MCP connections. Using the question of which customers were upset last week, he shows why live API lookups fail across large datasets and why synced local copies, routing, summarization, skills, memory, and traceable provenance are needed to build a reliable company brain.
Uber has transformed its software development with an agentic AI-powered factory, leading to a dramatic increase in engineer productivity. The presentation details six key infrastructure components: a unified model gateway with strict PII and safety guardrails, an MCP gateway for streamlined agent tool access and token optimization, agentified dev pods for rapid execution, a managed skills marketplace, a comprehensive context graph, and the Cortana AI assistant. Adam Huda then demonstrates an end-to-end feature development workflow, highlighting a critical shift to inner-loop validation (stopping short of CI) and automated, managed maintenance loops. The ultimate takeaway is that the bottleneck has moved from technical execution to strategic decision-making: "should we build it?" rather than "can we build it?"