Dharma

Founder retreats are a little different at @BrickyardVC

Moving quickly means protecting our engineers’ time. Robbie van Zyl (@rob_zedd), CEO and co-founder of @AskariDefense, explains in this Bloomberg article how we use AI to accelerate the back office, reduce operational clutter, and keep our engineering team focused on what matters most: building. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Agentic AI adoption is on fire at @Uber, and it's changing the way we build, not just in engineering, but across the entire company. Today, 99% of our engineers use AI tools. More than 70% of pull requests are attributed to local or cloud agents. And our engineers have built 2,500+ agent skills across the software development lifecycle. Those numbers are exciting, but they led us to a much bigger question: How do we bring agentic AI beyond engineering? Finance. Legal. Operations. Marketing. Customer Support. HR. Procurement. These functions run on complex workflows that are often manual, highly nuanced, and spread across dozens of systems. You can't automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation. You have to understand how the work actually gets done. So we created something called Agentic Pods. The idea is simple. We handpicked ~30 of our most AI-proficient engineers (people with deep knowledge of Uber's systems) and paired each of them with a domain expert from a business function. Then we gave every pod just two weeks. • Days 1 – 2: Shadow the expert. Observe every step. Document workflows. Ask questions. Build intuition. • Day 3: Prioritize opportunities based on scale, repetition, business impact, and data availability. • Days 4 – 5: Build a working agent alongside the person doing the job. • Days 6 – 9: Validate with several others performing the same work. Does it generalize? Does it actually make their job better? • Day 10: Ship. In just the past two months, we've run 16 Agentic Pods across 16 different business functions. • Capital allocation across 150 cities: 15 hours → 30 minutes. • Financial pacing reports: 2 days → 10 minutes. • Marketing web quality assurance: 2 weeks → 50 minutes. • Support workflow creation: 9,000 manual workflows → self-service automation. The productivity gains are impressive, but what surprised us most wasn't the speed. • It was how quickly engineers embedded in unfamiliar domains uncovered opportunities that had been hiding in plain sight. • The biggest wins rarely come from automating one task. They come from rethinking an entire workflow. Once you redesign the workflow around AI, you often eliminate handoffs, remove unnecessary approvals, replace legacy tooling, reduce vendor spend, and dramatically accelerate decision-making. • The workflow becomes the unit of automation - not the individual task. • The most impactful agent skills cut across teams, orgs, functions, tools, and systems. The biggest lesson? The best AI opportunities are rarely visible from the outside. You discover them by sitting next to the people doing the work, understanding every friction point, and building with them, not for them. We're now forming a dedicated team to scale this further and go deeper. They'll deeply understand the work, redesign it from the ground up, and use AI to fundamentally change how the business operates. It's exciting times!

This is exactly what we do at @tryharmonyai in the manufacturing context!! Brilliant Engineers + Domain experts with decades old tribal knowledge = 1000X outcomes You can’t redesign the future if you’re too far removed from the friction of the present. - @jainarvind , CEO of Glean