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

You cannot buy your way into truly effective AI for core business operations. Generic tools will always fall short where your specific data and workflows are concerned. Instead, your team needs to build a custom layer that connects directly to the systems you already run. This approach turns your existing infrastructure into an advantage, rather than a hurdle for off-the-shelf software.

Sharadh Krishnamurthy, from Stripe's engineering team, explained on the How I AI podcast why they built their internal AI agent, Kai, from scratch. They found that building allowed them to integrate governance, skills, and infrastructure layers directly into their existing systems. This meant using their infrastructure for human developers, which turned out to be exactly what agents needed. He also noted the hard lessons learned when agents nearly took down production systems, underscoring the need for careful controls.