Build your own company brain: the enterprise AI playbook from Stripe’s engineering team | Sharadh Krishnamurthy

Stripe engineering manager Sharadh Krishnamurthy revealed that the company built its internal AI agent Kai from scratch, which is now used by more than 10,000 employees weekly, citing the need for custom governance and data-layer controls. In a podcast episode, he detailed how Kai's 'projects' serve as a governance mechanism, its skills platform lets employees package workflows (with over 2,000 skills created), and that Stripe's existing developer infrastructure proved suitable for agent needs, though he noted lessons learned when agents nearly disrupted production systems.

Sharadh Krishnamurthy is an engineering manager at Stripe, where he helped build Kai, the company’s internal AI agent used by more than 10,000 employees every week. He’s worked across several of Stripe’s core infrastructure teams, including data and developer experience, which gives him a grounded, systems-level perspective on what it actually takes to make AI work at enterprise scale. He’s currently focused on the governance, skills, and infrastructure layers that let every Stripe employee use AI safely and effectively, regardless of their technical background. Listen or watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/AbZODZ 4VaM , Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4aRP2XSavdtrLG5FZoonOK , or Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-ai/id1809663079 What you’ll learn: 1. Why Stripe built Kai from scratch instead of buying, and what tipped the decision 2. What Kai knows about you by default and what you actually control 3. Why “projects” at Stripe are a governance mechanism, not just a folder 4. How Stripe structured its data layer so agents can query safely at scale 5. Why the infrastructure Stripe built for human developers turned out to be exactly what agents needed 6. How Kai’s skills platform lets any employee package a workflow, and what happens when you have 2,000 of them 7. What Sharadh learned the hard way when agents nearly took down production systems Brought to you by: DX https://getdx.com/howiai —Engineering intelligence for the AI era Hyperagent https://hyperagent.com/howiai —Deploy fleets of agents that handle real work In this episode, we cover: 00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM Introducing Sharadh 02:46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=166s Why Stripe built an AI agent Kai instead of buying tools 05:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=318s What Kai knows about you and what you can turn off 06:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=411s Projects as a governance layer 10:04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=604s Live demo: Kai builds a dashboard 12:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=738s Tools, skills, and the secure sandbox 17:22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=1042s Why Stripe has benefited so much from AI 19:20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=1160s Agentic identity, load shedding, and rogue agents 20:41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=1241s Iterating on the dashboard 25:01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=1501s How they rolled out Kai across the team 29:07 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=1747s How projects work 34:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=2058s Bespoke agents for bespoke use cases 35:58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=2158s The skill builder workflow 40:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=2440s Skill quality, evals, and telemetry 43:01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=2581s Recap 45:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZODZ 4VaM&t=2713s Lightning round Tools referenced: • Trino: https://trino.io/ https://trino.io/ • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ https://www.anthropic.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ https://gemini.google.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ https://www.cursor.com/ Where to find Sharadh Krishnamurthy: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadhk https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadhk Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ https://penname.co/ . For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email \ email protected\ /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection .