Building the Foundation for the Agentic AI Era

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
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**Chris Benson** (0:41)
Hey, welcome to another edition of the Practical AI podcast. I am your co-host going solo today. I'm Chris Benson.
Daniel's not with me this time, but we have an excellent conversation coming up for you. With me today, I have Angie Jones, who is the Vice President of the Agentic AI Foundation, which I think is a super cool title to have at a super cool name place. I'm really looking forward to finding out more about it. Angie, welcome to the show.

**Angie Jones** (1:11)
Thanks so much, Chris.

**Chris Benson** (1:13)
Like I said, they're in the intro, and I said it before the show started and stuff, like if somebody in AI was looking for a play, like the agentic, I mean, like it is, that is the coolest sounding thing you can have. But before we dive too far into the foundation, I'd really like to kind of hear, like, how does someone, like how do you develop in your career so that you end up doing that? Like, could you tell us a little bit about your background?
Because that's one of those things, if you went and just said something to like, I work with tons of people working on agentic AI, but like leading the foundation, people will say, I'm just curious, like, how do you get to that point?

**Angie Jones** (1:58)
Yeah.
So I'm your traditional techie. So I've worked as an engineer for a couple of decades. So I've placed this like IBM and Twitter.
And the last role was at Block in engineering leadership capacity. And so in that role, one of my tasks was to basically teach the entire company, 12,000 people, how to use AI agents. And this is as I'm learning myself, because I mean, there's no book for this, I'll write out the gate. And that was early like 2024 So a lot of this stuff was brand new. It was not even common in tech, let alone in others verticals. And so I also like lead developer relations. And so a big part of my role is helping developers worldwide understand new technologies and how to use them. And so our company, Block, created like this internal AI agent named Goose. And Goose, we were, the developers were using Goose to like automate engineering tasks, help with coding and things like that. And so we were teaching developers across the globe, what is an AI agent? Like we were very early in this. And so Jack Dorsey, who leads Block, was like, hey, Angie, you're teaching like everybody else about agents. I really would love for everyone in this company to learn how to use agents. And so I'm talking finance, marketing, like, you know, design, HR, everyone needed to learn about AI and more specifically how to utilize agents. And so me and the team went like really deep on this. And then it got to a point like pretty AI fluent company where everyone is comfortable using this. I needed to go really deep on the engineering org. And so that was my home.
Our engineers were using this, but we weren't seeing a big difference in like developer velocity, for example, right? And so we explored that and learned that, we're only at the tip of the iceberg. We really could do a whole lot more to get to this autonomous engineering org, right? And so I pretty much drank from the fire holes of like all of the news, all of the releases, everything that's going out.
And I consume that, kind of filter out a lot of the noise and then bring the things that are valuable to the engineers. And so I would say like I know a lot about the space. And also at my time at Block, I worked on a protocol. So this was like a cross border money movement protocol. So those who don't know Block, that's the company, the finance tech company that houses Square and Cash App, right? So money is our jam. So I worked on this protocol, never thought I would be a protocol girl, but learned a lot about like just kind of open standards and how all of that works as well. Also really big and open source throughout my career. I've always like believed in open source, contribute to open source, like advocate for it, right? So all of that kind of came together in this perfect storm as OpenAI, Anthropic and Block wanted to form a foundation for agentic AI. They understood that, hey, some of these standards, some of these open source projects that we're coming up with, we probably shouldn't be the sole authors or owners of these things, right?