Beyond The Pilot: Enterprise AI in Action

VentureBeat
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AI gets real here. On “Beyond the Pilot,” top business execs share what actually happens after the AI proof of concept — from infrastructure and org design to wins, failures, and ROI. Not theory, but deep dives into how they scaled AI that works.

  1. Inside LinkedIn’s AI Engineering Playbook

    1D AGO

    Inside LinkedIn’s AI Engineering Playbook

    While the rest of the industry chases massive models, LinkedIn quietly achieved a major engineering breakthrough by going small. In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Erran Berger (VP of Product Engineering, LinkedIn) opens the "cookbook" on how they distilled massive 7B parameter models down to ultra-efficient 600M parameter "student" models—scaling AI to 1.2 billion users without breaking the bank. AI Gets Real Here. This isn't theory. Erran details the exact architecture, the "Multi-Teacher" distillation process, and the organizational shift that forced Product Managers to write evals instead of specs. In this episode, we cover: The Distillation Pipeline: How to train a 7B "Teacher" and distill it to a 1.7B intermediate and 0.6B "Student" for production. Synthetic Data Strategy: Using GPT-4 to generate the "Golden Dataset" for training. Multi-Teacher Architecture: Why they separated "Product Policy" and "Click Prediction" into different teacher models to solve alignment issues. 10x Efficiency Hacks: Specific techniques (Pruning, Quantization, Context Compression) that slashed latency. Org Design: Why the "Eval First" culture is the new requirement for AI engineering teams. 🚀 CHAPTERS 00:00 - Intro: LinkedIn's Massive "Small Model" Feat 04:00 - Why Commercial Models Failed at LinkedIn Scale 08:00 - The "Product Policy" Funnel & Synthetic Data Generation 12:00 - The Pipeline: 7B → 1.7B → 600M Parameters 19:00 - The "Multi-Teacher" Breakthrough (Relevance vs. Clicks) 23:00 - How They Achieved 10x Latency Reduction (Pruning/Compression) 31:00 - Changing the Culture: Why PMs Must Write Evals 35:00 - The "Bright Green Matrix": Measuring Success & Future Roadmap Presented by Outshift by Cisco Outshift is Cisco’s emerging tech incubation engine and driver of Agentic AI, quantum, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more at outshift.cisco.com. About VentureBeat: VentureBeat equips enterprise technology leaders with the clearest, expert guidance on AI – and on the data and security foundations that turn it into working reality. 🔗 CONNECT WITH US Subscribe to our Newsletters for technical breakdowns: https://venturebeat.com/newsletters Visit VentureBeat: Venturebeat.com . . . Subscribe to VentureBeat:     /  @VentureBeat   . . Subscribe to the full podcast here: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venturebeat/id1839285239 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Zti73yb4hmiTNa7pEYls4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/VentureBeat #EnterpriseAI #LLMDistillation #LinkedInEngineering #SmallLanguageModels #AIArchitecture #TechLeadership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    41 min
  2. Most enterprise AI agents are Slop - here’s why they fail

    JAN 7

    Most enterprise AI agents are Slop - here’s why they fail

    The "TAM" for AI Agents isn't software. And there is a $10 Trillion opportunity. In this episode, Replit CEO Amjad Masad reveals why 99% of today's enterprise AI agents are just "Slop"—unreliable, generic toys that fail in production. We dive deep into the engineering reality of building autonomous agents that actually work, moving beyond simple chatbots to systems that can navigate the messy reality of enterprise infrastructure. Amjad breaks down Replit’s "Computer Use" hack that makes agents 10x cheaper than generic models, explains why "Vibe Coding" is the future of the C-Suite, and issues a warning to technical leaders: If you want to ship fast in the AI era, you need to kill your product roadmap. In this episode, we cover: The "Slop" Problem: Why most LLM outputs are generic and how to inject "taste" back into software. The Computer Use "Hack": How Replit built a programmatic verifier loop that outperforms vision-based models. Vibe Coding: Why non-technical domain experts (HR, Sales, Marketing) will build the next generation of enterprise software. The $10T Market: Why the Junior Developer role is disappearing and being replaced by the "Manager of Agents." 🚀 CHAPTERS 0:00 - Intro: Why most AI Agents are "Toys" 03:02 - The only 2 AI use cases making money right now 06:00 - The "Crappy Product" Strategy (Shipping fast) 10:00 - What is "AI Slop"? (And how to fix it) 14:30 - The "Deleted Database" Incident: Solving Reliability 18:00 - The "Squishy" Divide: Why Marketing Agents fail 21:45 - Vibe Coding in the Enterprise 26:00 - Model Wars: Claude Opus vs. Gemini vs. OpenAI 28:10 - The "Computer Use" Hack (10x Cheaper, 3x Faster) 36:00 - Why Product Roadmaps are Dead 43:00 - Replit is the #1 Software Vendor (Ramp Data) 49:00 - The Unit Economics of Agents (Token Costs vs. Value) 53:00 - Open Source vs. Closed: The "Cathedral of Bazaars" 59:00 - The $10 Trillion Opportunity: Replacing Labor 🔗 CONNECT WITH US Subscribe to our Newsletters for technical breakdowns: https://venturebeat.com/newsletters Visit VentureBeat: Venturebeat.com #AgenticAI #Replit #VibeCoding #EnterpriseAI #LLM #SoftwareEngineering #FutureOfWork #AmjadMasad #ArtificialIntelligence #DevOps . . . Subscribe to VentureBeat:     /  @VentureBeat   . . Subscribe to the full podcast here: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venturebeat/id1839285239 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Zti73yb4hmiTNa7pEYls4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/VentureBeat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 3m
  3. How JPMorgan Engineered a 30K AI Agent Economy

    12/17/2025

    How JPMorgan Engineered a 30K AI Agent Economy

    Inside the 'Agent Economy': How 30,000 AI Assistants Took Over JPMorgan While most enterprises were scrambling after ChatGPT launched, JPMorgan Chase was already two years ahead. 🚀 In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, we sit down with Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase, to reveal how the world’s largest bank built an internal AI platform that is now used by 1 in 2 employees daily. Derek shares the contrarian insight that drove their strategy: AI models are commodities; the real moat is connectivity. Learn how they scaled from zero to 250,000+ users, why they empowered employees to build 30,000+ of their own "Personal Agents," and how they are solving the data privacy challenge at an enterprise scale. 🔥 IN THIS EPISODE: The "Super Intelligence" Thought Experiment: Why raw intelligence is useless without enterprise connectivity. The Agent Economy: How JPM enabled non-technical staff to build 30,000 custom AI assistants. The Adoption Playbook: How to break through the "30% wall" and get the majority of your workforce using AI. Build vs. Buy: Why JPM built their own "LLM Suite" instead of waiting for vendors. ⏳ CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction: The JPMorgan AI Story 01:45 - The 3 Core Principles Behind JPM’s Strategy 03:25 - The "Super Intelligence" Thought Experiment 05:00 - Data Privacy: Why JPM Doesn't Train Public Models 06:00 - Viral Adoption: From 0 to 250k Users 09:20 - Evolution of LLM Suite: From RAG to Ecosystem 14:00 - The "Moat" is Connectivity, Not the Model 23:00 - The Agent Economy: 30,000 Employee-Built Assistants 31:00 - Governance & Guardrails for AI Agents 33:00 - Crossing the Chasm: Getting to 60% Adoption 40:00 - The "Product" Mindset: Solving Business Problems First 42:30 - The Future: End-to-End Process Transformation 46:25 - The "Unsolved" Problem Derek Wants to Fix 🙏 SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR: This episode is presented by Outshift by Cisco. Learn more about their work on the Internet of Agents and the open-source Linux Foundation project: 🔗 https://www.agentcy.org 🎙️ GUEST:  Derek Waldron | Chief Analytics Officer, JPMorgan Chase HOSTS: Matt Marshall | VentureBeat Sam Witteveen | VentureBeat #EnterpriseAI #JPMorgan #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #FinTech #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #BeyondThePilot . . . Subscribe to VentureBeat:     /  @VentureBeat   . . Subscribe to the full podcast here: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venturebeat/id1839285239 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Zti73yb4hmiTNa7pEYls4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/VentureBeat https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMQoSwszBxm5dCv2bdqGnJ0QAL9n7Ds4_ 🔗 CONNECT WITH VENTUREBEAT: Website: https://venturebeat.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/venturebeat X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/VentureBeat Newsletter: https://venturebeat.com/newsletters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    46 min
  4. How Booking.com Boosted Agent Accuracy 2x with Mini LLMs with Pranav Pathak

    12/03/2025

    How Booking.com Boosted Agent Accuracy 2x with Mini LLMs with Pranav Pathak

    We built AI agents by accident... and it worked. 🤯 In this episode of VentureBeat’s Beyond the Pilot, we go inside the engineering brain of Booking.com with Pranav Pathak (Director of Product Machine Learning). Pranav reveals how they "stumbled" into agentic architectures before the term even existed, how a simple text box revealed a massive missed revenue opportunity (the "Hot Tub" story), and exactly how they stack LLMs, RAG, and Orchestrators to handle millions of travelers without breaking the bank. If you are building Enterprise AI, this is the blueprint for moving from "cool demo" to production scale. 🚀 In this episode, we cover: The "Hot Tub" Revelation: How free-text AI search exposed features customers desperately wanted but couldn't find. Real ROI Metrics: How LLMs drove a 2x increase in topic detection accuracy and freed up 1.5x of agent bandwidth. The Booking.com AI Stack: A full breakdown of their Orchestrator → Moderation → Agent → RAG architecture. Latency vs. Intelligence: Why they don't use GPT-5 for everything and how they decide between small models and big brains. The Memory Problem: How to build AI that remembers user preferences without being "creepy”. 00:00 Introduction to Agentic Architectures 00:30 Meet Pranav Pathak from Booking.com 01:24 Evolution of Travel Recommendations 03:41 Impact of Gen AI on Customer Service 07:29 Building an Effective AI Stack 10:32 Agentic Systems and Best Practices 13:45 Choosing Between Building and Buying AI Solutions 18:51 Evaluating AI Models for Business Use 24:10 Challenges in Human Evaluation 25:06 Recommendation System and Data Utilization 27:26 Innovations in Travel Search 29:04 Journey and Challenges in ML Integration 32:08 Managing Memory and User Data 38:07 Future of Travel Assistance 41:33 Advice for New AI Integrations 43:57 Final Thoughts and Farewell 🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: OutShift by Cisco (Sponsor): outshift.cisco.com VentureBeat: www.venturebeat.com #ArtificialIntelligence #GenAI #Bookingcom #MachineLearning #AgenticAI #LLM #TechPodcast #EnterpriseAI . . . Subscribe to VentureBeat:     /  @VentureBeat   . . Subscribe to the full podcast here: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/venturebeat/id1839285239 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Zti73yb4hmiTNa7pEYls4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/VentureBeat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    46 min
  5. NOTION - Unpacking Ryan Nystrom's AI Journey: From Challenges to Custom Agents

    11/19/2025

    NOTION - Unpacking Ryan Nystrom's AI Journey: From Challenges to Custom Agents

    In our inaugural episode, we sit down with Ryan Nystrom, leader of the AI team at Notion, to pull back the curtain on Notion 3.0. Ryan reveals the journey of integrating powerful AI agents into the productivity platform and draws fascinating parallels between the current AI era and the mobile revolution he witnessed at Instagram. He shares exclusive insights into the development challenges, the critical role of tools, context, and curation, and how custom agents are poised to reshape work. Plus, Ryan offers essential advice for any company diving into the AI space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 29m

  6. 10/20/2025 · BONUS

    Venture Beat in Conversation: MongoDB - From Lift-and-Shift to AI-Ready Data

    Lift-and-shift isn’t enough. MongoDB’s Vinod Bagal breaks down how to modernize your data for AI — and why waiting could cost you your competitive edge. Host: Sean Michael Kerner Guest: Vinod Bagal For more stories visit venturebeat.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    13 min

  7. 10/13/2025 · BONUS

    FBI Veterans on AI Cyber Threats & Future Defenders

    AI is accelerating the cyber arms race — and former FBI agents Paul Bingham and Mike Morris say most enterprises aren’t ready. In this VB in Conversation, they break down the real-world threats targeting critical infrastructure, how AI is changing the attack surface, and why smart, layered defense starts with training the next-gen cyber workforce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    12 min

  8. 10/08/2025 · BONUS

    AI CHAT: 70% of Enterprises Adopt AI Agents: The Real-World Impact

    Key Insights and Takeaways from VentureBeat Transform Event: AI and Enterprise Innovation In this episode, Matt and Sam recount their experiences and insights from the recent VentureBeat Transform event, an annual gathering focused on enterprise AI. They discuss the significant takeaways, including the increasing adoption of AI agents in production, the lack of dominance by any single hyperscaler in the AI model space, the focus on practical AI solutions over super-intelligence hype, and the evolving structure of teams in the AI-driven workplace. Highlights include insights from speakers at major companies like American Express, Google, IBM, and Zoom, as well as discussions on AI safety and the changing management dynamics with AI agents. Tune in to get a comprehensive overview of the current state and future of AI in enterprise settings. 00:00 Introduction and Event Overview 00:51 Key Takeaways from VentureBeat Transform 02:46 AI Deployment in Enterprises 04:37 Insights from Industry Leaders 08:48 Hyperscalers and Model Dominance 12:12 Real-World AI Applications 14:04 Focus on Practical AI Solutions 24:08 The Future of AI Teams 30:37 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    36 min
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About

AI gets real here. On “Beyond the Pilot,” top business execs share what actually happens after the AI proof of concept — from infrastructure and org design to wins, failures, and ROI. Not theory, but deep dives into how they scaled AI that works.

Information

  • Creator
    VentureBeat
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 VentureBeat. All rights reserved.

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