
ai engineering @nvidia. previous: co-founder @freeplay_ai, engineering lead @mainstreet, @twitter, @gnip.
Boulder, CO
Joined March 2009
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Great conversation. Kevin shares real, practical lessons from building AI agents at scale. Worth a listen if you're leading an engineering team through this shift.
ποΈNew Deployed episode with Kevin Stanton from @SproutSocial.
They're building agents that process billions of social messages and turn it all into signal. He shares great lessons learned as an engineering leader.
One example, the benefits of chat UX: it's the fastest way to "seed your evals" with real traces, and a product manager's holy grail to learn what customers actually want to do.
This is a fun one: the @Chime team is doing AI the right way - cross-functional, rigorous, and fast. Proud @freeplay_ai has been alongside them building the platform + workflow to scale AI engineering. π
Replying to @cairns
In the last year, lots of teams have been trying to get PMs and domain experts more involved in AI product development and evals.
Folks like @HamelHusain and @sh_reya have evangelized how important this is.
Chime has figured it out, read on. π
freeplay.ai/blog/chime%E2%80β¦
Pleased to share that @freeplay_ai is HIPAA-compliant and our SOC 2 Type II is renewed. Weβre supporting Fortune 100 teams with multi-region, private-cloud deployments. Enterprise-grade controls, strong encryption, on-prem options. Details at: trust.freeplay.ai
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
ποΈ New Deployed episode with @ryancarson, "Builder in Residence" at @AmpCode.
It's a great convo about building code agents and building as a solo founder at the same time, and it's refreshingly honest.
Case in point, on evals for coding agents: "We do not have a set of evals that we programmatically run to decide if GPT-5 is better than Sonnet-4 yet... everybody in the trenches building these agentic coding tools understands that it is so dynamic, and so frustrating."
Great conversation about building with AI, developer experience, and what happens when everyone can code. Check it out. π
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
Our very own @kellyschaefer (PM Director of @stitchbygoogle @julesagent) was featured on the Deployed podcast with @cairns. She talks about how tech roles are evolving in the AI era, the Labs approach to eval sets, and more!
Full video: youtube.com/watch?v=tYVCHzYKβ¦
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
I had a great conversation with @kellyschaefer on the latest Deployed podcast about how she and her teams build AI products at Google Labs. Things like NotebookLM, Jules, etc.
LOTS of good alpha on product strategy, team dynamics, PM career advice...
This clip's about getting started with evals. Lots of folks need to hear this. π
Freeplay is now open to everyone π
The end-to-end platform for product teams to observe, test & optimize your LLM/agent workflowsβalready powering companies from Fortune 100s to leading startups.
Free tier is live + $5.6M fresh funding to ship faster.
Build better AI β freeplay.ai/blog/the-platforβ¦ β¨
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
A few of us from @freeplay_ai are in SF this week for @aiDotEngineer. Come say hi in the expo hall and check out our talks if you're around. π
Both talks are focused on the product and ops realities to ship AI products that work β how to navigate bringing AI products to life in the Fortune 500, and how to run a tight data ops process in sync with engineering to delivery high quality AI products in production.
ποΈ From Hunch to Handoff: How AI PMs Can Help Turn Ideas Into Shippable Features Quickly
π
Wednesday, June 4 @ 2:40 pm
With: Jeremy Silva & Eliza Cabrera
ποΈ The Build-Operate Divide: Bridging Product Vision and AI Operational Reality
π
Wednesday, June 5 @ 11:00 am
With: Jeremy Silva & Chris Hernandez
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
The next Colorado AI Builders event is happening in Denver on Wednesday June 25th! Sign up now before it books up. π
The last one had over 600 RSVPs for a space that maxed out at 300... Link below for this one.
At the last event we got to see:
* A preview of the new Jules coding agent from @Google (the week before it was fully released at I/O!)
* Amp, the newest coding agent from @Sourcegraph
* @zapier Agents
* How @Spekit π is using AI to help sales teams
* How Nephrolytics uses AI to improve kidney care
This one will feature a mix of builders from startups and big companies, covering a range of topics and types of AI products. All Colorado-based presenters.
Huge thanks to our sponsors at @SiliconVlyBank, @Zapier, @Sourcegraph and Technical Integrity for making the event happen.
You can't debug agent workflows by looking at just the forest OR just the trees. You need both. This launch from the @freeplay_ai team nails it.π
The shift to companies building AI agents has been dramatic over the past 6 months. Things like observability and evals have gotten way more complex.
We just introduced Agents in Freeplay to give people a clean, integrated workflow to build, test, evaluate and improve agents.
Quick demo here, and details in thread. π
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
SaaS is blocked by security. OSS is too much overhead for SRE/DevOps...
@freeplay_ai's new Bring Your Own Cloud option is the perfect path for enterprise AI teams:
β
Full Freeplay stack in your VPC
β
Zero sensitive data egress
β
One-line deploy
β
Automated updates, always in sync
Run evals and AI observability safely, without headaches.
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
1/ How do the best startup teams hire well?
Every company that finds product-market fit has customers to support, fires to handle. But if they donβt prioritize hiring, they fall into a vicious cycle, increasingly behind and unable to scale.
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
π― Fresh conversation with Box CTO Ben Kus about building AI agents for the enterprise.
Good timing with the @aiDotEngineer Summit on agents this week!
Box has 100K+ customers and manages petabytes of unstructured data, and generative AI gave them superpowers to help customers make sense of all that data.
They've invested in generative AI search and summary features from early on, and they've been getting into more complex agentic behavior for a while now.
Ben shares a bunch of good highlights and practical lessons learned from their experience that will be interesting to Freeplay customers and anyone else building agents at scale:
π― How they got started with generative AI, built teams, and decided what to build
π€ What's going on with agents these days, and what's involved to bring them to true enterprise customers
π¬ Moving beyond chat and conversational UX to apps that just do the work for you
π οΈ Foundational tools they've invested in, including the essential role of LLM judges to build high quality products (especially since they never look at customer data)
Check out the link below to get the full episode on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.
Massive congrats @bscholl @boomsupersonic πΊπΈπ©οΈ
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
ποΈSolid new podcast for your weekend! @a_a from @SierraPlatform talks about how they build enterprise agents that actually work.
We started Deployed so that other builders could learn from leaders who are building AI systems at scale. Sierra's at the front of the pack with agents and Arya talks about:
* Bringing AI Agents to Life With Customers
* The Agent Development Stack
* Building a Comprehensive Evaluation System
* The Essential Role of Domain Experts
* Designing Effective Feedback Loops
π Check it out, full episode links are here:
freeplay.ai/blog/building-enβ¦
Eric Ryan πͺ π» retweeted
ποΈ How does a 13-year-old SaaS company with 12,000 customers transform itself into an AI-native business?
@helpscout founder Nick Francis posted today on LinkedIn about how they've done this, including changing their whole pricing model.
We recently got to talk about this question and more on the Deployed podcast with Nick and @lacion, Help Scout's VP of Engineering. Check it out!
What makes their story fascinating isn't just that they've added AI features β they've completely restructured their business to account for AI capabilities. It's changed how they think about product strategy, how their engineering team works, and what they deliver to customers.
Key highlights from our conversation:
β
The story behind their decision to eliminate seat-based pricing after 13 years
β
Their journey to build AI expertise within their engineering & product organization
β
Why they created an "AI Quality Lead" role to bridge domain expertise and AI development
β
How they shifted engineering culture to embrace the experimental nature of AI products
Check out the full episode below. Thanks Nick and Luis for sharing your journey with everyone. π
freeplay.ai/blog/how-help-scβ¦
Building AI-powered software shouldn't be a solo mission.
We're creating the platform for entire teams to ship great AI products together.
Join us at @freeplay_ai. We have 4 new roles open β
jobs.ashbyhq.com/Freeplay
Questions? Reach out to @cairns or me directly.
The future of AI product development is cross-functional and collaborative. New @freeplay_ai updates let engineers and technical-adjacent folks work together seamlessly on AI systems that use tools π οΈπ€π
π οΈ As more teams build agentic AI systems, weβve wanted to make it easier for cross-functional product teams to collaborate when building with tools.
Bunch of new updates in @freeplay_ai recently! Here's what's new: π§΅











