Autonomous Agents Will Replace Traditional Software: Ex-Waymo Tech Lead's Prediction

The easy part of voice AI takes 10 minutes. The hard part is everything that follows. Voice AI can handle a basic appointment in 10 minutes - but handling tens of millions of calls without failing is the one Brooke Hopkins left Waymo to solve. On this episode of the 1st10 Podcast, host Boris Epstein sits down with Brooke Hopkins, ex-Waymo tech lead and founder/CEO of Coval, which recently announced their $28M Series A round. Brooke pointed out the surprising parallels between teaching self-driving cars to navigate real roads and teaching voice agents to handle real conversations at scale. During their conversation, Brooke and Boris talked about: The hidden architectural flaw causing most voice agents to fail in production. The critical maturity milestone conversational AI is facing right now. A lesson from driverless cars that changes how teams should judge an agent before launch. The reshaping of the workflow that once made sequential engineering feel natural. The surprising reason that Coval's veteran Head of Design stopped relying on Figma. Along the way, she shares how Coval's engineers build software with parallel AI agents, why her Head of Design abandoned Figma for code, and what $28 million in fresh funding means for the next phase of voice AI. 00:00 Preview of the Episode 00:38 Introducing Brooke Hopkins 01:34 Brooke's Journey From Abu Dhabi To SF 04:44 What Google Assistant And Waymo Had In Common 06:00 3 Layers -- 1 Pattern 08:34 Watching Waymo Grow Up In Public 11:07 Voice AI's "2016 Problem" 14:58 What "Critical" Really Means For Voice Agents 17:52 Voice Unlocks More Than A Phone Call 21:27 How Coval'S Engineers Build Software 25:00 Measuring Engineering Judgment 29:01 $28M Series A! What's Next?! 31:01 A Bold Prediction For 2027 "Anyone can build a voice agent that handles appointments basically in 10 minutes. But to get it to be able to handle tens of millions of calls, the last 20% of edge cases - that is really the crux and the hard part of this product." - Brooke Hopkins (07:12) "I would definitely say we're in the 2016 era of self-driving where it feels like you've made this massive progress. [...] But really it's this last 10%, last 5% that's that long tail of issues." - Brooke Hopkins (11:23) "Voice AI is the most natural interface to AI. Or conversation in general is the most natural interface to AI." - Brooke Hopkins (17:52) "When I started the company, I was delightfully naive. And I think that's a great way to start." - Brooke Hopkins (25:37) Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/1st10podcast Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e8ec9af-f38c-4cd9-8c68-1c1dd4516b 27/1st10-podcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1st10-podcast/id1760411207 Podcast: https://www.1st10.com/podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/f951319c/podcast/rss YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Website: www.1st10.com Podcast: www.1st10.com/podcast Twitter www.x.com/1st10engineers LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/1st10/ YouTube: www.youtube.com/@1st10podcast Brooke Hopkins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnhop/ Coval AI: https://www.coval.ai Music by Roman Senyk from Pixabay Producer: Shrikant Joshi (42quirks.com)