The enterprise AI stack behind Stripe’s company brain “Kai”

Sharadh Krishnamurthy is an engineering manager at Stripe, where he helped build Kai, the company’s internal AI agent used by more than 10,000 employees every week. He’s worked across several of Stripe’s core infrastructure teams, including data and developer experience, which gives him a grounded, systems-level perspective on what it actually takes to make AI work at enterprise scale. He’s currently focused on the governance, skills, and infrastructure layers that let every Stripe employee use AI safely and effectively, regardless of their technical background. *What you’ll learn:* 1. Why Stripe built Kai from scratch instead of buying, and what tipped the decision 2. What Kai knows about you by default and what you actually control 3. Why “projects” at Stripe are a governance mechanism, not just a folder 4. How Stripe structured its data layer so agents can query safely at scale 5. Why the infrastructure Stripe built for human developers turned out to be exactly what agents needed 6. How Kai’s skills platform lets any employee package a workflow, and what happens when you have 2,000 of them 7. What Sharadh learned the hard way when agents nearly took down production systems *Brought to you by:* DX—Engineering intelligence for the AI era: https://getdx.com/howiai Hyperagent—Deploy fleets of agents that handle real work: https://www.hyperagent.com/howiai *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introducing Sharadh (02:46) Why Stripe built an AI agent (Kai) instead of buying tools (05:18) What Kai knows about you (and what you can turn off) (06:51) Projects as a governance layer (10:04) Live demo: Kai builds a dashboard (12:18) Tools, skills, and the secure sandbox (17:22) Why Stripe has benefited so much from AI (19:20) Agentic identity, load shedding, and rogue agents (20:41) Iterating on the dashboard (25:01) How they rolled out Kai across the team (29:07) How projects work (34:18) Bespoke agents for bespoke use cases (35:58) The skill builder workflow (40:40) Skill quality, evals, and telemetry (43:01) Recap (45:13) Lightning round *Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode:* How Stripe Built Kai: Data Dashboards, Reusable Skills, and Enterprise AI Governance: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/how-stripe-built-kai-data-dashboards-reusable-skills-and-enterprise-ai-governance ↳ How to Create a Custom Data Dashboard on the Fly with a Natural Language AI Agent: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-create-a-custom-data-dashboard-on-the-fly-with-a-natural-language-ai-agent ↳ How to Turn a One-Off AI Chat Session into a Reusable Workflow for Your Team: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-turn-a-one-off-ai-chat-session-into-a-reusable-workflow-for-your-team ↳ How to Implement AI Governance with Context-Aware Project Controls: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-implement-ai-governance-with-context-aware-project-controls *Tools referenced:* • Trino: https://trino.io/ • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ *Where to find Sharadh Krishnamurthy:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadhk *Where to find Claire Vo:* ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co._