Build your own company brain: the enterprise AI playbook from Stripe’s engineering team | Sharadh Krishnamurthy
- ID
- 22090
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 07 Sep 2026, 8:04 PM
- Fetched
- 07 Sep 2026, 9:48 PM
- Provider
- Lenny's Newsletter
- Category
- product-startup
- Original URL
- https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/build-your-own-company-brain-the
- Source URL
- https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/feed
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 07 Sep 2026, 9:48 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_agent_userssaas_foundersai_ml_learners
What happened
Sharadh Krishnamurthy, an engineering manager at Stripe, describes how the company built Kai, an internal AI agent used by 10,000+ employees weekly, from scratch rather than buying off-the-shelf tools. The interview covers Stripe's governance model (projects as a control layer, not folders), a skills platform that grew to ~2,000 employee-packaged workflows, a data layer using Trino for safe agent queries at scale, and a hard lesson where agents nearly took down production systems.
Why it matters
If you are building or planning an internal AI agent for your company, Stripe's architecture decisions are directly actionable: treat 'projects' as a governance boundary for agent permissions, build a skills layer so non-technical staff can package workflows, and put load shedding and rogue-agent controls in place before rollout—not after agents nearly break production. The decision to build vs buy hinged on needing deep integration with existing data infrastructure, which is a framework founders can apply to their own build/buy reasoning.
Discussion angle
Stripe's skills platform reached ~2,000 employee-built workflows—what does the quality and eval story look like when non-engineers are packaging agent skills, and how do you prevent skill sprawl from becoming a liability?