Durable Execution and the Infrastructure Powering AI Agents

**Samar Abbas** (0:00)
Building stateful applications require orchestrating calls across dozens of microservices with variable availability characteristics. You can imagine state management became a big mess there. Imagine a really busy kitchen at a restaurant. All sorts of chaos going on. The real world is complex. There is all sorts of chaos going on in a restaurant. But at the end of the day, there is a really clear outcome the restaurant is looking for. Every order gets processed in a very specific sequence of steps. Then eventually, every order translates to being delivered to a customer exactly once. This is exactly what Durable Execution provides. We completely abstract out state management. For you as a developer building an order management system, you just code up your business logic, and we are the execution authority of making sure every order gets processed exactly once in the presence of all sorts of chaos and failures in the system.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:55)
What happens when an AI agent fails halfway through a task? If it's a short prompt, you start over. If it's a three-hour deep research job burning thousands of tokens, you've lost real money and real time. Durable Execution solves this. The idea started at Uber in 2015, where two engineers built a system that could remember the state of any running process and recover it seamlessly after a failure. That project became Temporal. Today, Temporal powers OpenAI's Codex, processes every snap story, and runs transactions for Coinbase and YUM brands. As AI agents get longer running, more autonomous, and more expensive to restart, the need for guaranteed execution has gone from nice to have to mission critical. But scale is only part of the story. The real question is what infrastructure the agent era actually requires and what it's still missing. A16z's Sarah Wang and Raghu Raghuram speak with Samar Abbas, CEO of Temporal.

**Sarah Wang** (1:52)
Maybe a kickoff just for the audience. Can you share a little bit more about what exactly is durable execution and why does it matter?

**Samar Abbas** (2:00)
So Temporal is an open source platform which ensures durable execution of your code. What that means is if during an execution of your function, if a failure happens, we remember all of the state. And then we seamlessly and transparently resurrects that execution on a different host along with that state and continue executing exactly where it left off without you as a developer writing a single line of code for it. In a nutshell, that's the core value proposition of what we are trying to enable with Temporal as a platform.

**Raghu Raghuram** (2:39)
In a modern application, the reason this is hard is because a modern application consists of so many distributed parts, correct?

**Samar Abbas** (2:47)
Exactly. And so that's why when you think about the core primitive we are building is super straightforward. But to Raghu's point, now it is so broadly applicable to such a broad spectrum of problems out there. To kind of bring this to life is imagine a really busy kitchen at a restaurant. Okay. Yeah. And at any given night, a busy restaurant is probably taking hundreds of orders. Every order might look different. Some get prepared quicker. Some takes a little bit longer. They can come in, not in a uniform way. Suddenly a lot of customers come in. You might see spikes of orders coming.

**Sarah Wang** (3:29)
Chaotic, yeah.

**Raghu Raghuram** (3:30)
Yeah.

**Samar Abbas** (3:31)
But at the end of the day, there is a very clear outcome the restaurant is looking for. Every order gets processed in a very specific sequence of steps. And then eventually, every order translates to being delivered to a customer exactly once. That's what the outcome they are looking for. Imagine all sorts of chaos going on. The real world is complex. There is all sorts of chaos going on in a restaurant. Stations might go down, essentially. And oh, a particular chef might take a break or some new person come in without any context on how much of preparation has already been done. What the thing that restaurant cares about is how many items are on the menu and how to prepare each one of those items in a specific fashion. But handling all of those failures, handling these spikes or handling all these failure cases of stations going down and coming up or when failure happens, how do you make sure you have enough state to continue processing that order where you left off?
Those are not the things that restaurant cares about. This is exactly what durable execution provides. We completely abstract out state management. We completely, for you as a developer building an order management system of a restaurant, you just code up your business logic and we guarantee all of that state or each and every order gets processed. We are the execution authority of making sure every order gets processed exactly once in the presence of all sorts of chaos and failures in the system.