How Block’s custom AI agent supercharges every team, from sales to data to engineering

Gooses are AI agents. We kind of designed it to be really agnostic. You tell it what you need it to do by connecting it to different capabilities, and it can just solve any problem. What I'm gonna do is take that CSV that Jackie was working with, I'm just gonna pop it over, and I'm gonna say, "Can you read through this data? Use it to create items in my Square dashboard."

So we took a CSV that we didn't even have to look at, that probably had data that was not in this exact format, and you created a product catalog.

What a lot of my work and what my team is trying to do is not just make it faster for someone like me or on my team who has data expertise to go through this, but to allow our finance team, our sales team, anyone in the company, to be able to dig in and self-serve a lot of this data, rather than having to ask an expert and wait for that to come back.

You have been the first person that's told me [chuckles] it was the salespeople that were begging for it. We hear so much, you know, engineers are leading in, and they wanna vibe code, and they wanna do all that. But it's nice to hear that the folks close to customers and close to revenue are also seeing the value. [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we're speaking with Jackie and Brad at Block, who are gonna show us how their open-source AI agent, Goose, can be used to do everything from vibe data analysis to vibe coding in MCP. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by CodeRabbit, the AI code review platform, transforming how engineering teams ship faster with AI without sacrificing code quality. Quality code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request, beyond just flagging issues. CodeRabbit provides one-click fix suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST GREP patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit brings AI-powered code reviews directly into VS Code, Cursor, and Windsor. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 10 million PRs, been installed on one million repositories, and has been used by 70,000 open-source projects. Get CodeRabbit free for an entire year at coderabbit.ai, and use the code HOWIAI. Thanks for being here!

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, excited to chat.

I am so excited to have you two on How I AI, because I have been so impressed how Block has, as a full organization, and a large organization at that, really embraced AI, it seems, everywhere and for everything. And, you know, everybody's worried about AI-native startups, but you're one of the companies that I really think is going there very fast as a much larger organization. So how did you lean in as an org so fast and so broad?