Nir Soudry, Head of R&D at 7AI, breaks down how teams can move from early experimentation to real production work fast, without shipping chaos. If you are building AI features or agent workflows, this conversation is a practical look at speed, safety, and what it actually takes to earn customer trust.
Nir shares how 7AI ships in tight loops with a real customer in mind, why pushing decisions closer to the engineers removes bottlenecks, and how guardrails and evaluation keep fast releases from turning into security risks. You will also hear a grounded take on human plus AI collaboration, and why “just hook up an LLM” falls apart at scale.
Key takeaways
• Speed starts with focus, pick one customer and ship something usable in two or three weeks, then iterate every couple of weeks based on real feedback
• If you want velocity, remove the meeting chain, get engineers in the room with customers and push decisions downstream
• Agent workflows are not automatically testable, you need scoped blast radius, strong input and output guardrails, and an evaluation plan that matches real production complexity
• “LLM as a judge” helps, but it is not magic, you still need humans reviewing, labeling, and tuning, especially once you have multi step workflows
• In security, trust is earned through side by side proof, run a real pilot against human outcomes, measure accuracy and thoroughness, then improve with tight feedback loops
Timestamped highlights
00:28 What 7AI is building, security alert fatigue, and why minutes matter
02:03 A fast shipping cadence, one customer, quick prototypes, rapid iterations
03:51 The velocity playbook, engineers plus sales in the same meetings, fewer bottlenecks
08:08 Shipping agents safely, blast radius, guardrails, and why testing is still hard
14:37 Human plus AI in practice, how ideas become working agents with review and monitoring
18:04 Why early AI adoption works for some customers, and how pilots build confidence
24:12 The startup reality, faster execution, traction, and why hiring still matters
A line worth sharing
“When it’s wrong, click a button, and next time it will be better.”
Pro tips you can steal
• Run a two to four week pilot with one real customer and ship weekly, the goal is learning speed, not perfect coverage
• Put engineers directly in customer conversations, keep leadership focused on unblocking, not gatekeeping
• Treat every agent like a product surface, define strict inputs and outputs, sanitize both, and limit what it can affect
• Build evaluation around real workflows, not single prompts, and combine automated checks with human review
• Add feedback buttons everywhere, route feedback to both model improvement and the team that tunes production behavior
Call to action
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