From AGENTS.md to Enterprise Deployment

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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Daniel Whitenack (0:41)

Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. This is Daniel Wightnack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a Principal AI and Autonomy Research Engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Benson (0:56)

Hey, doing great today. How's it going?

Daniel Whitenack (0:58)

It's going great, and I know this is going to be a great conversation for a few different reasons today. One of those being our guest is one of the speakers at the upcoming Midwest AI Summit, which is going to be amazing. There's going to be a bunch of amazing speakers there. I'm going to do a bit of MCing, see if I don't mess that up. I would encourage our listeners to check that out October 15th in Indianapolis. You can get 20% off with PracticalAI20, so check that out.

Amazing speaker, going to be at the Midwest AI Summit. Also, a fellow podcaster, which is great. One of the hosts of Cloud Foundry Weekly, and a tech marketing whiz at Broadcom Tanzu VMware. Welcome, Nick. Great to have you.

Nick Kuhn (1:50)

Thanks for having me. Great to be on the show.

Daniel Whitenack (1:53)

Excited.

Nick Kuhn (1:54)

Also excited to see all in person in Indianapolis.

Daniel Whitenack (1:57)

Yeah, it's going to be fun. We're representing the good representation of the Silicon Prairie here. I like it.

So yeah, Nick, I know you're going to be talking. One of the things I thought was cool about your talk at the Midwest AI Summit is you bring in this concept of taking like AGENTS.md and shipping that to a production environment where you run an actual agent in an quote enterprise environment, which seems to be really fascinating. We recently had on someone from the Agenetic AI Foundation who is kind of stewarding the model context protocol and AGENTS.md and those sorts of things. So very relevant kind of carry on from that conversation. But I'm wondering as we set that up, what exactly does it mean to be operating in an enterprise environment? So the customers that you're working with, your kind of day-to-day, what makes an enterprise environment an enterprise environment? What are some of the concerns or characteristics of that type of environment? And I know you're always experimenting, you do a lot of HomeLab stuff as well. So always have a whole range of experience in working in different sorts of environments. So yeah, if you could just help us understand from a general perspective, what does that mean when you say kind of enterprise?

Nick Kuhn (3:31)

Right. So yeah, if we think of the enterprise, we think about a few things.

One, let's just assume you're going to have not limited or no internet access. And I've been at VMware Tanzu for about five years. And before that, I was at one of these large enterprises for about 14 years. So when we had vendors come in, they would always assume that we could just go to the internet. And I was always like, well, try again, because that's not going to work here. So that's kind of always like the biggest hurdle where you're going to be regulated.

What you can do at home is not going to be what you can do at work, so to speak. So you're going to be highly regulated. You're going to have to deal with potential like PCI or SOX compliance or HIPAA or FIPS. And I could probably go on and on about all the different compliance tiers that you would have to deal with. So it's just a whole different ballgame where you could potentially do something that has dramatic consequences. And you have a highly controlled, highly regulated environment where even some of the customers I work with, they actually have the real air gap. We're carrying in things physically into the data center because there is no internet access type of thing. So it's a wild world, and it frustrates a lot of, I think, new folks to the enterprise base. But if you've been in it in a while, you know how to deal with it and how to handle it type of thing.