Tech Talks Daily
00:18:00 · Valerie Henderson
[00:18:00] S1: Yeah. I feel like I am truly inspired by our customers because, like I said, this is not easy work, but I've been super impressed. We have a customer, Smarsh, that basically rebuilt their entire software delivery process with Agentic SDLC on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Code. And millions of dollars of engineering capacity were freed up, and they were able to reinvest that back into the business to continue to innovate. And to me, that's really amazing being able to break things down and then build it back up. And they were really clear on what they were trying to achieve. And at the end of the day, with that return, they said, okay. We have an opportunity to jump ahead of the competition to continue to push ourselves to be better. And at Caylent, we're disciples of only the paranoid survive, and getting to work with customers that are thinking about things from that perspective too is amazing. And so I would say I go more into the delight rather than kind of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt side of where we are right now. I think in any given time with a shift like this, you have dystopian and utopian thoughts. Yeah. I believe things are often somewhere in the middle. My mom used to say things are never as good as you think. They're never as bad as you think either. And I think right now that that's something that you have to really ground yourself in. And the cool thing is we're getting to work with customers that are seeing ROI and especially in that software development space. And we... You can see that in a lot of the data. You have a ton of economists doing work on where this is actually showing up. And right now, we work with a ton of technology customers, and that's a massive opportunity. And how you make that put it back into your business to go even further or faster.
00:19:49 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:19:49] S0: And, also, when I was reading up on you guys, I I think I read that there's something was a big obsession with model accuracy over the last couple of years, but I think I was reading that you were saying that model accuracy is no longer enough to judge whether an agent is actually ready to go into production. Can you just expand on that for for me for anyone that's not seen that?
00:20:06 · Valerie Henderson
[00:20:06] S1: Well, I think model accuracy is just one small part of it. I think you have to think about the... There's so many different models, agents, and there has to be, in my opinion, a sense of experimentation, but you also want the right expertise, which goes back to why companies like Caylent and other organizations are so important right now. I feel like what we do has never been more critical than it is today. And number one, I think that there is a sense of, of course, excitement about that. But like I said, a deep level of responsibility is needed right now. And you have to think about things, like I said, in terms of the security, the guardrails, the spend, the access. And access, by the way, is one of the most challenging things. And you think about how simple it should be, but every customer that has worked with different platforms for single sign in and then... We all know that that is not easy. And if it's not easy for humans, think about what that looks like for agents. So just thinking about those building blocks is really critical. So regardless of how good the agent is, if you are not, again, breaking these things down and being very smart about what and where and when and how, it doesn't matter.
00:21:24 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:21:24] S0: So Yeah. Completely agree. And I think we will have to get you back on early next year to talk about identity access management. It's a whole podcast episode on its own. And I was saying a moment ago, 2026 has been the year of Agentic. I don't know if you can share what you've been up to this year, but most importantly, any teasers you can leave us with on what you're looking towards, what you're working towards next year? Anything you can share there.
00:21:49 · Valerie Henderson, Neil C. Hughes
[00:21:49] S1: It's crazy to me that we're weeks away from 2027. I think this year has felt the shortest and the longest of any in my career. What I would say is we know that there is such a massive amount of pressure to adopt AI. And for... From my perspective, Caylent being able to alleviate that pressure for customers is the most important thing that we do. And that means we need to see around corners. We need to be as far ahead as we can. I think being ahead of the frontier is not possible, but how do you take the frontier and bring the value to customers and help meet them where they are? And now is the time. And the other piece is how do we continue to drive the the critical development of our people? And you've heard a lot about FTEs in the last, you know, few weeks and months and all of the things, and there's a lot of noise around that. From my perspective, the expectation of an FD is AI fluency, a deep level of engineering expertise, and true customer leadership, and there's no compression algorithm for experience. So just being able to make sure that we've got the right path for our people to be able to get into those roles is so so important. [00:23:06] S0: Yeah. Completely agree. And I think it's a powerful moment to end on. And for everybody listening, I will include a link to the research that I mentioned a moment ago so people can check that out. But anywhere else, I should be sending them if they wanna connect with you, your team, or or just find out more information about all things Caylent.
00:23:06 · Neil C. Hughes, Valerie Henderson
[00:23:06] S0: Yeah. Completely agree. And I think it's a powerful moment to end on. And for everybody listening, I will include a link to the research that I mentioned a moment ago so people can check that out. But anywhere else, I should be sending them if they wanna connect with you, your team, or or just find out more information about all things Caylent. [00:23:23] S1: Yeah. No. I love it. Thank you so much. This has been really fun. And anytime, I'm happy to jump on with you. You're such a deeply curious person, which we love. You can find us. We have YouTube. We have LinkedIn. I would say LinkedIn has been really powerful for us. We've got some incredible customers and stories and, of course, our website as well. So please, please come find us, caylent.com, and, again, really looking forward to chatting with you again. [00:23:47] S0: Awesome. Well, every... For everybody listening on techtalksnetwork.com, there'll be a blog post associated with this episode. There will be videos, LinkedIn, everything we've talked about, including that research. So I urge people to check that out. But as I said, the door is always open for you to come on and join. We're just so much we could talk about. We could have spoke for another hour quite easily, but just more than anything, thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Really appreciate your time. [00:24:11] S1: Thank you so much, Neil.