Why AI Agents Can't Be Trusted Yet (And How to Fix It) | Moe Katib (One)

**Moe Katib** (0:00)
I was telling her that like, you need to use the system. It's just better for you, but she had no reason to believe that it is better. She had huge responsibilities in her hand, and she needed to deliver that responsibility, and she felt that deeply. And all I was telling her is that this is better, but I have no proven point. She didn't not trust the system.
She didn't trust an unproven system. In order for people to adopt the systems that we design as engineers, they need to trust it. I use my credit card and I tap on it, and I walk away.
Nobody is concerned. It just happens, right? My credit card could be Canadian, and I could be in San Francisco, or I could be in Spain, and I would do the same tap, and I would walk away, and nobody will trace me, nobody will say any single word. Why? Because everybody trusts that the money is going to go to the right place. We need to do the same thing for agents. When I tell my agent, do something, it's gonna do it. And if it doesn't know how to do it, or if it's unsure, I know that it's gonna tell me.

**Anne Dwane** (1:02)
Welcome to the Village Global Podcast. I'm Anne Dwane, and I'm here today to welcome Moe Katib of One. That's withone.ai.
And Moe's been working for 20 years on software integrations. But recently, over the past year or so, he's been agent-pilled. And now at One, he's doing the integration work that we all don't want to do, and he's superpowering agents and people. So we're going to talk about his decision to open-source all 54,000 integrations that he had assembled. And then we're also going to talk about a really optimistic future of work. His vision is that we won't be chained to our computer, and that we'll have agents that we can trust.
Welcome, Moe. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit more about a few of the stories that have shaped your life as a person and a founder.

**Moe Katib** (1:57)
Yes, absolutely. So I am originally Syrian, born in Damascus, and really what shaped my story, there are about three stories that I can give you that shaped my story, and what made me who I am, and what made me want to do what I want to do, and what I do.
So believe it or not, I've always been entrepreneurial and I didn't actually know it. And so the first story that really shaped my life was, when I was a kid, back in Syria, in Damascus, my family, my father is a businessman, my grandfather is a businessman, my uncles, every single one, they're entrepreneurs, business people. So I grew up around that sort of environment. We didn't have the choice where in the summer time, you're either going to school or you work. So you'd have to pick one or the other.
And in many cases, I actually picked both. I would study and work. So early on, you're brought up into that environment even when you were a child. So I would go with my father to his job and you're engaging with a lot of these business people. But at one point in my life, my dad thought that it would be good to give me a job that is really harsh. Because he's like, okay, if he works at a harsh environment, he's going to become a better man. He'll be able to handle things more effectively. So my uncle owned a chicken factory. This is everything from literally raising the chicken, hatchery, all the way to the slaughtering house, the whole mechanism.

**Anne Dwane** (3:33)
The chicken value chain.

**Moe Katib** (3:34)
The chicken value chain, exactly.
So anyway, that's my dad's uncle. He goes to him and he goes like, okay, so Moe is looking for a job. He wants to work and then he tells him behind the scenes, I knew this later, that like, they basically scripted a job that's the most difficult job that not even a single person would actually normally get it. So they put me in every difficult place, like literally, I'm like, so anyway, I'm working in this and it sucks. It's really terrible, you know, like you stink and all of this. But you learn quite a lot of different things. And as a process, what ends up happening is, I'm working with the chicken, so I have access to really high quality chicken.
So I bring home some of these chicken. My dad tells my aunts and aunts tells their neighbor, and before I know it, I'm transferring 100 kilos of chicken on a daily basis. And I'm like this little kid and I'm carrying these like weights of chicken. And I'm like, this sucks. But you're not going to tell my aunt, I'm sorry aunt, I can't deliver it for you because you can't do that. And then one day, I delivered for my aunt the chicken and this like really big chicken. And so my aunt is cutting them and I see she's doing a lot of work cutting them off.