E19: The AI Agent Revolution with Matt Welsh of Fixie.ai

Nathan Labenz sits down with Matt Welsh, the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.AI which just raised $17M in seed funding. The technology world's attention has turned en masse to AI agents over the last month, but Matt, a former Harvard professor and ex-Google, has been focused on AI agents for longer over at Fixie. The platform is currently in developer preview mode, where developers can build agents and end users can try them. Agents hold the promise of handling not only the core cognitive work, but many of the messy implementation details as well – the searching & finding, sorting through & scanning, signing in & navigating, reading documentation & using APIs – all the manual ad hoc routing of information for which we act today as human plumbing. -- We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the first episode with the architect of Netflix’s culture deck Patty McCord. https://link.chtbl.com/hrheretics TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Preview of the episode (02:08) Why AI Agents are so topical right now, and Matt's prescience with Fixie (06:40) How Matt started Fixie (10:55) How AI Agents "figure out the plumbing" (15:57) How Matt envisions work changing in the near term + concrete examples (22:40) Building your own agent (26:00) New threat model and guardrails of this new paradigm (34:48) Synthetic memories in autonomous agents (42:39) Examples of incredible use cases (48:00) Single sign on idea (51:00) Form factor for AI-assisted living (54:32) Matt's hopes and fears for AI TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @mdwelsh (Matt) @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off. https://www.omneky.com/ More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com Also, check out the debut of co-host Erik's new long-form interview podcast Upstream, whose guests include David Sacks. Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0 Music Credit: OpenAI's Jukebox