No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:17:23 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:17:23] S1: Is there anything you're personally excited about on the roadmap or just from a technical exploration perspective on the Cloudflare front that you feel like is going to enable this ecosystem in the future? [00:17:37] S0: Well, yeah, absolutely. On the content side, we've released a conference monetization gateway where we make it easy for people to put their sites behind us and take microtransactions for their content. Including providing wallets for agents to use and a stablecoin that's going to be able to help facilitate that transaction as well. We're also doing things with OpenAI, a project called signals where we're making it easier for agents to actually discover content instead of having to crawl the entire Internet and continually go back to pages. We're making it easier for them to know what's new content and actually kind of more proactive to do that. So it's a win for the AI labs as well as a win for the site owners not having to get constantly crawled and pay for that infrastructure. So there's a whole set of new laws on the Internet that I'm really excited to see all those of grow to see X402 from when Stripe came out with it, I loved it because it went back to the four zero two HTTP code, which was Tim Burns Lee created twenty plus years ago or thirty plus years ago for payments. So you kind of always knew that you needed a better payments rail on the Internet, but we haven't been able to kind of figure it out. And I think agents will lead us to that as well.
00:19:09 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:19:09] S1: When you think about these initial products that you've released, is there... What what would success for a content creator or somebody who ostensibly had a website on the Internet that they were monetizing with ads before? Like, what's the what's the killer success case you guys need to see or show the world where it just becomes like a default to do this? [00:19:33] S0: Well, I mean, I think we're instead of them paying us, we're paying them. Right? Where it's covering their infrastructure costs, it's providing money that supports their livelihood. We can actually increase the number of content creators out there, which the last generation of the Internet has done very well, like with YouTube and TikTok and it's... I mean, actually making it even exponentially larger. [00:20:03] S1: And when you look at the Workspace OS release and ecosystem work that you guys have been doing, what is... What are you hoping are the biggest use cases of it coming up?
00:20:03 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:20:03] S1: And when you look at the Workspace OS release and ecosystem work that you guys have been doing, what is... What are you hoping are the biggest use cases of it coming up? [00:20:17] S0: This is transitioning a little to a new release called Cloudflare OS. And Cloudflare OS is our internal platform for how our employees use AI every day, where we... And it actually goes back to security roots where we were very worried about customer data, internal data leaking out, and we wanted to make sure that our employees could use all the new AI tools and models, but have a way to safely deploy them internally to understand how that data is being used and flowing and good governance over that. In addition, the reason my company called CloudflareOS is we started to realize that as we have more and more agents, we needed to be able to teach them what made Cloudflare special, how we build at Cloudflare. And for humans, we did that through Cloudflare University and the onboarding process and meeting your colleagues and working with them. But we needed to kind of more clearly define that and document that for agents. And so Cloudflare OS is both the platform where our employees can build anything that they want in a secure way without having to... Security is not something that they have to think about. The BER that's trying to create a call list, they don't have to worry about security. It's just built in there for them. But they also know that it's being done in a way that is consistent with the themes and values of how software works.
00:21:42 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:21:42] S1: And why release... I think of this as somewhat different from the other products that Cloudflare offers today in that it is not infrastructure. It's like an end user facing product for managing AI use within the organization. Why release it? Or do you think of it as a departure? [00:22:01] S0: Yeah. I mean, for one, it's kind of reference architecture really. Over the past ten years, we've built our developer platform where we started with just a simple serverless compute primitive and now over 100 different developer platform tools from storage to databases to durable objects. We wanted to show how you can build it completely on Cloudflare and how we build things internally and kind of give people the option to fork it and build their own version of their own company OS on top of it. [00:22:40] S1: And what is a way in which it is helping your people and your organization that you think is like clear success?
00:22:40 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:22:40] S1: And what is a way in which it is helping your people and your organization that you think is like clear success? [00:22:48] S0: It's actually used more by our go to market teams and our G and A teams than it is used by our engineering teams. It's giving them a very fast... Early on, I thought we saw training was the biggest gap for people using AI. And when you just point them at a chat interface or another by putting tool, it's too much of a blank slate for them. And so this is a platform that's designed... You design everything for it for how your business works, and they immediately can go there and get access to all the data that they need. They can get guided and taken through where they quickly realize, Oh, this is not trying to replace me. This is trying to make me better at my job. That's been really exciting to see just all the different ways people at the company have done that. A lot of how the conference got put together, the marketing team built hundreds of internal tools where previously they would have to go out and work with different agencies, but the speed that they can move with a smaller team now is just amazing. [00:24:00] S1: Assuming this is a continuation starting in May, you guys did this restructuring to be an AI first organization. What else reflecting on the last number of months has worked or not worked that you would recommend to others?
00:24:18 · Dane Knecht
[00:24:18] S0: Yeah. I mean, so restructuring was hard saying goodbye to some our colleagues. It was the first time Cloudflare ever did it. Had always been very careful not to overhire. This was for different reasons. This is because we saw the way AI was transforming some teams and how they work. Kind of thought of it as like a factory floor where you needed to actually rebuild, rethink how things happen. There were some processes or some... The way a product inventor would send an email before to customers, it involved three teams. It involved a team where you went to BI to go get a cohort of the people that you wanted to send an email to. You went to the marketing team to help you design the email and get the voice right. You went to the marketing operations team to get the email out. Where you're never going to be able to actually redesign that process unless you kind make some hard changes and force people to kind of rethink, well, what actually is the right way to do that? And it might not involve those three teams at all. It might just involve a new way of doing things. So what came out of that was a tool where a product manager now goes in and describes the cohort. They write an email. It rewrites it in Cloudflare's voice. It sends it to their manager, and the manager can click approve if they like it, and it goes out. We didn't go from three teams getting faster at doing that. We went to one tool that can kind of let a product manager now become a superpower they didn't have before.