Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻

ai engineering @nvidia. previous: co-founder @freeplay_ai, engineering lead @mainstreet, @twitter, @gnip.

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

Great conversation. Kevin shares real, practical lessons from building AI agents at scale. Worth a listen if you're leading an engineering team through this shift.

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

🎙️New Deployed episode with Kevin Stanton from @SproutSocial.

They're building agents that process billions of social messages and turn it all into signal. He shares great lessons learned as an engineering leader.

One example, the benefits of chat UX: it's the fastest way to "seed your evals" with real traces, and a product manager's holy grail to learn what customers actually want to do.

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

This is a fun one: the @Chime team is doing AI the right way - cross-functional, rigorous, and fast. Proud @freeplay_ai has been alongside them building the platform + workflow to scale AI engineering. 👇

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

In the last year, lots of teams have been trying to get PMs and domain experts more involved in AI product development and evals.

Folks like @HamelHusain and @sh_reya have evangelized how important this is.

Chime has figured it out, read on. 👇

https://t.co/JvwUOWVBQ6

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

Pleased to share that @freeplay_ai is HIPAA-compliant and our SOC 2 Type II is renewed. We’re supporting Fortune 100 teams with multi-region, private-cloud deployments. Enterprise-grade controls, strong encryption, on-prem options. Details at: https://t.co/D6pQSmjCcJ

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

🎙️ New Deployed episode with @ryancarson, "Builder in Residence" at @AmpCode.

It's a great convo about building code agents and building as a solo founder at the same time, and it's refreshingly honest.

Case in point, on evals for coding agents: "We do not have a set of evals that we programmatically run to decide if GPT-5 is better than Sonnet-4 yet... everybody in the trenches building these agentic coding tools understands that it is so dynamic, and so frustrating."

Great conversation about building with AI, developer experience, and what happens when everyone can code. Check it out. 👇

[Google Labs @GoogleLabs]

Our very own @kellyschaefer (PM Director of @stitchbygoogle @julesagent) was featured on the Deployed podcast with @cairns. She talks about how tech roles are evolving in the AI era, the Labs approach to eval sets, and more!

Full video: https://t.co/wdtWtiFQ40

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

I had a great conversation with @kellyschaefer on the latest Deployed podcast about how she and her teams build AI products at Google Labs. Things like NotebookLM, Jules, etc.

LOTS of good alpha on product strategy, team dynamics, PM career advice...

This clip's about getting started with evals. Lots of folks need to hear this. 👇

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

@saranormous @cairns @freeplay_ai Thanks so much for your support and guidance @saranormous! 💪

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

@cairns @freeplay_ai 💪🚀

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

Freeplay is now open to everyone 🌎

The end-to-end platform for product teams to observe, test & optimize your LLM/agent workflows—already powering companies from Fortune 100s to leading startups.

Free tier is live + $5.6M fresh funding to ship faster.

Build better AI → https://t.co/BxDSTBph8S ✨

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

A few of us from @freeplay_ai are in SF this week for @aiDotEngineer. Come say hi in the expo hall and check out our talks if you're around. 🙌

Both talks are focused on the product and ops realities to ship AI products that work — how to navigate bringing AI products to life in the Fortune 500, and how to run a tight data ops process in sync with engineering to delivery high quality AI products in production.

🎙️ From Hunch to Handoff: How AI PMs Can Help Turn Ideas Into Shippable Features Quickly
📅 Wednesday, June 4 @ 2:40 pm
With: Jeremy Silva & Eliza Cabrera

🎙️ The Build-Operate Divide: Bridging Product Vision and AI Operational Reality
📅 Wednesday, June 5 @ 11:00 am
With: Jeremy Silva & Chris Hernandez

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

https://t.co/dBWEDPUxbx

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

The next Colorado AI Builders event is happening in Denver on Wednesday June 25th! Sign up now before it books up. 🙌

The last one had over 600 RSVPs for a space that maxed out at 300... Link below for this one.

At the last event we got to see:

* A preview of the new Jules coding agent from @Google (the week before it was fully released at I/O!)
* Amp, the newest coding agent from @Sourcegraph
* @zapier Agents
* How @Spekit 🐙 is using AI to help sales teams
* How Nephrolytics uses AI to improve kidney care

This one will feature a mix of builders from startups and big companies, covering a range of topics and types of AI products. All Colorado-based presenters.

Huge thanks to our sponsors at @SiliconVlyBank, @Zapier, @Sourcegraph and Technical Integrity for making the event happen.

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

You can't debug agent workflows by looking at just the forest OR just the trees. You need both. This launch from the @freeplay_ai team nails it.👇

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

The shift to companies building AI agents has been dramatic over the past 6 months. Things like observability and evals have gotten way more complex.

We just introduced Agents in Freeplay to give people a clean, integrated workflow to build, test, evaluate and improve agents.

Quick demo here, and details in thread. 👇

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

SaaS is blocked by security. OSS is too much overhead for SRE/DevOps...

@freeplay_ai's new Bring Your Own Cloud option is the perfect path for enterprise AI teams:

✅ Full Freeplay stack in your VPC
✅ Zero sensitive data egress
✅ One-line deploy
✅ Automated updates, always in sync

Run evals and AI observability safely, without headaches.

[sarah guo @saranormous]

1/ How do the best startup teams hire well?

Every company that finds product-market fit has customers to support, fires to handle. But if they don’t prioritize hiring, they fall into a vicious cycle, increasingly behind and unable to scale.

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

@ilanbigio @stevendcoffey @nikunjhanda @kevinweil Crushed it! 💪

[sarah guo @saranormous]

the gap between benchmarks and real-world use cases is…a chasm

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

🎯 Fresh conversation with Box CTO Ben Kus about building AI agents for the enterprise.

Good timing with the @aiDotEngineer Summit on agents this week!

Box has 100K+ customers and manages petabytes of unstructured data, and generative AI gave them superpowers to help customers make sense of all that data.

They've invested in generative AI search and summary features from early on, and they've been getting into more complex agentic behavior for a while now.

Ben shares a bunch of good highlights and practical lessons learned from their experience that will be interesting to Freeplay customers and anyone else building agents at scale:

🎯 How they got started with generative AI, built teams, and decided what to build

🤖 What's going on with agents these days, and what's involved to bring them to true enterprise customers

💬 Moving beyond chat and conversational UX to apps that just do the work for you

🛠️ Foundational tools they've invested in, including the essential role of LLM judges to build high quality products (especially since they never look at customer data)

Check out the link below to get the full episode on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.

[Eric Ryan 🎪 🐻 @ericwryan]

Massive congrats @bscholl @boomsupersonic 🇺🇸🛩️

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

We are so back 🇺🇸

[Ian Cairns @cairns]

🎙️Solid new podcast for your weekend! @a_a from @SierraPlatform talks about how they build enterprise agents that actually work.

We started Deployed so that other builders could learn from leaders who are building AI systems at scale. Sierra's at the front of the pack with agents and Arya talks about:

* Bringing AI Agents to Life With Customers
* The Agent Development Stack
* Building a Comprehensive Evaluation System
* The Essential Role of Domain Experts
* Designing Effective Feedback Loops

👇 Check it out, full episode links are here:
https://t.co/B11EP9nsnq