Decagon’s Playbook for Building Enterprise AI Applications

Jesse: My my view on this is that for deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new, right? If you're building a SAS company 5 years ago, most SAS products are pretty well explored, right? like you roughly know what the user is trying to do and your job is maybe come with a slightly cleaner workflows but broadly you know what the user is trying to do with a design app or a CRM or something like that because those workflows have been explored with AI products nobody knows what the workflows are because nobody's used these things before so a for deployed engineer in this case is honestly just embedding with the customer to learn the workflow for the first time as the customer learns the workflow for the first time and they're kind you know, kind of paving the road like you they're kind of laying out the track as they see which way the train is going in a way. Uh but long term, I think they should just be building product, right? Like once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on four deployed engineers anymore because once you know what the workflow is, if you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling properties of a tech company.

Jesse: And so what duet is is it's kind of a separate agent. It's like a second agent that's much bigger, much slower, but its job is to do all the tasks I just described. So now instead of us having to write these AOPs and write these integrations and tools into their systems and write these tests and monitor the conversations, do just does all of that, right? So it's like a it's a second agent that is smart enough to do all these things and um it it just feels very magical because you can just literally tell it like hey I've nothing built yet so far, but here's a bunch of transcripts I have and here's some documentation. like you go figure out the best way to like do these all these procedures I want and it'll go do it and then of its own accord it'll also write the tests and simulations that go along with those.

Jesse: I think in the short term actually it is the ability to work with enterprise resources and what I mean by this is that the capability of models today is far greater than they are being used for within the enterprise right by which you can't just take a model and say I'm just going to give this model access to everything within the enterprise and I'll it'll just figure everything out right like that's practically not how these things So to make models like this deployable within the enterprise, right? Like let's assume that every model is like just perfect and makes no mistakes. But to make something like this deployable within the enterprise, you need to say, okay, I need a way to be able to tell the model what it can and cannot do and make sure that it cannot do anything like catastrophically wrong. Then I need a way to make sure that, you know, hundreds of people within the enterprise can collaborate to make sure that the agent is behaving as expected in the use cases in which they are experts.

Asha: Most of them are not just immediately saying, okay, now what I will do is, you know, let go of 60% of my team. They're saying okay now that this thing which is clearly valuable for my customers is much cheaper let me do more of it so that my customers retain for longer so that you know they don't turn off as much so that they activate sooner things like that you know we had a customer in the early days um they and this was you know probably two and a half years ago at this point um where they said you know our ticket volume you know the amount of customer support inquiries that we get uh per month was I I think I think it was like 50,000 a month or something based on uh you know the existing surfaces that they had. Once they started using us they said wow turns out our customers have a lot of problems they said let us make support more easily accessible right so instead of it just being in one part like buried within a support panel. They're like let's put support on every page and let's make it more prominent in places where people are more likely to get stuck.