Every week, Anthropic or OpenAI ships something that would have taken a startup months to build — and they ship it at a quality level most startups can’t match even after months of polishing. Anthropic Managed Agents. Hermes Agent. New agent tooling every week — everyone says the world just changed. Maybe. But here’s what I keep seeing deploying agents into actual teams: the bottleneck isn’t the agent. It’s the tools the agent needs to talk to. ...
In late 2023, we were deep in customer discovery — 60+ interviews trying to find a hair-on-fire problem. One thing was undeniable: every company wanted to use LLMs to improve productivity. Obvious, right? The harder part was what came next. The gap Companies wanted custom AI — trained on their internal knowledge, embedded in their actual workflows. But getting there required deep integration work that most teams couldn’t justify. The ROI wasn’t proven, the technology was still moving fast, and the teams we were targeting (technical support, SRE, internal ops) sat inside Series A+ orgs with long procurement cycles. ...