theCUBE + NYSE Wired present the East Coast AI Leaders Executive Series | Kris Talajic, Kubiya.ai

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Kris Talajic

Global VP Growth

Kubiya.ai

play_circle_outline Introduction to Kubiya.ai and its global VP Chris, a former professional soccer player.

play_circle_outline Unlocking AI Potential: Leveraging Intentional Relationships, DevOps Revolution, and Scaling Teams with Kubiya

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Kris Talajic, Kubiya.ai

Kris Talajic

Global VP Growth Kubiya.ai

TheCUBE is covering events in New York City, focusing on AI leaders in the finance market and private companies. Chris, global VP of growth at Kubiya.ai, discusses the concept of delegation in AI and how Kubiya is making platform engineering easy with integration into Slack. The company is preparing for KubeCon and aims to help companies tackle the time-to-automation paradox.

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for our Cube Studio East. We're on the balcony overlooking the show floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A lot of action, a lot of trades happening. We had great conversations about AI leaders here. And of course ranging the conversation into how the finance market. We had a great conversation about private companies. Of course founders have been the big story. And the hot startup here is in the studio. Chris, he's the global VP of growth at Kubiya.ai, which stands for Cube and Hebrew, which is not related to theCUBE but we like the company. Great founding team. Kubiya has been on the cube many times. Great to have you, Chris.

>> Well, pleasure to be here.

>> You're our first professional soccer player that's been on theCUBE. Former soccer player.

>> Former. Unfortunately former, yeah.

>> So where? Croatia. Is that where you played?

>> Croatia, yeah.

>> Cool. Defense?

>> Defense. Central midfielder.

>> All right. Okay. Good sliding tackles all the time where you had no red cards?

>> Unfortunately a lot of those, but yes.

>> Red cards happen a lot on defense. Well, great to have you on, and congratulations on coming onto Kubiya. I know you had some good successes in tech. I like this company. They're like, not pre-series A, but they really cracked the code. And I've been using the term delegation lately because I think the founder, Amit Govrin, talks about this, delegating trust and having trust. That's been the theme of all conversations around unlocking data. Automation needs trusted delegation to create these intentional relationships for AI to work. And then agents and having the right teammates is a critical thing. But what I love about Kubiya is they're making platform engineering really easy. And I love how they've integrated into Slack.

>> Yeah.

>> By Slack it's just, you just use Slack and you just give it a command and magic happens. And I think that's a great interface. With voice coming over the top, you're going to see a lot more of that user experience making the life easier for platform engineers. So I'm a big fan of what Kubiya's doing. Again, I think you guys still haven't had your breakout yet. I know you got some news coming that's going to come out of KubeCon coming up.

>> Correct.

>> So give us your take. You're looking at the growth, looking at customers. What are some of the things that you guys are talking about now as you go into KubeCon? I'm sure there's still been some... I know you have some big customers, but what is the conversation like when you talk with customers?

>> Yeah. Well, you put it really well, mentioning Slack. The whole idea of this concept of delegation, it has to meet the user where they are every day. So on a daily day use like they would talk to a human being through Slack, they're talking here to AI teammates. And what we're seeing on the market is more and more companies coming back with, automation was a great concept but when they put it into work, it really didn't work for them. So we approach it from the aspect of time to automation paradox. And that's where, when you're putting in a lot of effort and time to create these automation, often enough you're not getting the value out of it that you would. So that's what we tackle, and that's why we say delegation is the new automation, like you mentioned. And that's what, it's actually really resonating with especially enterprise customers.

>> Chris, one of the things, we just had an interview earlier. we had Ahmed on from Kiva.ai. He's the CEO, founder. He hit a home run because I liked what he said around, they know the customer. They're going after the human in the loop. What I like about Kubiya is that it's like DevOps AI built by DevOps pros.

>> Correct.

>> So the domain expertise is super critical in this AI equation because AI is not the answer to every... it's not the silver bullet. It's the human augmentation. And productivity gains only come if the models work better.

>> Exactly.

>> So what I like about what you guys have done with the platform engine, I've been covering every KubeCon ever since Kubernetes started. There's a lot of weird things that go on in Kubernetes. Right?

>> Yeah.

>> And it's, as it gets more stable and has its Linux moment being kind of stable and running, orchestrating workloads. Now the engineers who were doing platform engineering, soon to be doing data engineering need to be moving faster.

>> Correct.

>> And so there's a lot of weird command lines, scripts, and code that gets done in managing things. And then usually you do things in a silo. I got to check this node, cluster. But now you can just have AI do that all at once.

>> Exactly. That's the full idea. The idea is not to exchange humans, it is to enable them to work more effectively with AI teammates that can actually go in and do all that work that you just mentioned for them so they can actually focus on the critical tasks.

>> Last night at the founder dinner reception we had here, I was talking in my group. I was kind of the captain of a discussion group. Someone said, "AI is a team sport." And it's not a hobby, it's really work, but it's fun. So it's not just, hey, I'm going to do this just for fun. It's a team sport where you've got to rely on each other.

>> Exactly.

>> This is where DevOps I think has been really such a great movement, is because the DevOps culture is all about team and scale.

>> Yeah.

>> And this is where I think AI is either going to succeed or fail in organizations, because if you look at it as just, oh, I got AI solving my problems. But it's got to work within a team construct.

>> Correct.

>> What's your reaction to that?

>> I fully agree. The whole concept in our approach is that you can actually scale your team without needing to scale the head count, meaning you're getting your team to be more effective in what they do, but they have to work together with AI. You can't just let AI do everything for you.

>> Yeah. You're new to Kubiya so I have to ask you this question. What impressed you about what they got on? Was it the demo? Was it the team? What was the reason why you joined Kubiya?

>> Yeah, two critical things. It's the people and the product. I was fascinated both with the founders of Kubiya, both Amit and Shaked. Domain experts, like you mentioned, which is critical for the product. And the product on the other side. We just released AI Teammates a month and a half ago officially and we already have some very big enterprise customers backing us up and running their critical use cases with us.

>> I love the name Teammates. It was a good call, whoever came up with that marketing. I like the DevOps for DevOps, being built by DevOps people, because I think that's, at the end of the day, trust for me. Because a lot of people say they solve a lot of problems but don't. What I'm more interested in is, what specifically are you guys doing to help the Kubernetes mission become more reliable so that people can get to more AI? Because there's more data coming.

>> Correct. Data is always coming, right?

>> Yeah.

>> We'll never get away from that. So what we are doing there is we're taking off some of these tasks on a day to day that these engineers would have to be doing. Managing Kubernetes, making sure everything is set up, which can be delegated to an AI Teammate, allowing them to have more time to work on more critical situations and skills.

>> What's the coolest thing you've seen in Kubiya that you can share? I know you can't release some of the news that's coming out at KubeCon. What's the coolest thing you're seeing?

>> To keep it broad, the ability to really delegate end-to-end tasks to an AI teammate and knowing that, out of 100 times you ask it, you'll get 100 times the same answer. So there's no hallucinations in the models.

>> So take your Kubiya hat off for a second and then just give your personal perspective. As you look at all the web, the cloud companies like the Stripes of the world. And these are cloud-native, born in the cloud companies. And there's new people coming in to do gen AI. What do you think are the biggest challenges for organizations trying to implement the new tech?

>> Data and just making sure that these models are reliable. We all know AI, you play with ChatGPT, you ask it five times the same thing and you'll get six answers. And that becomes a problem when it comes to compliance. So I think that's the biggest challenge organizations are struggling with right now, is how do they make these models reliable and repeatable and controllable?

>> Yeah. And the thing is that you got so much misinformation out there around everyone hyping up and flexing their own wares.

>> Yeah.

>> Everyone's working on the best thing where they answer at the edge in AI. It's hard. It's a hard thing to do.

>> Yeah.

>> When I talked to Amit about this, he's very opinionated about Kubiya because if you think about... I knew Kubiya before ChatGPT had their moment, and I remember talking to him about it. They were doing agents before agents.

>> Yeah.

>> And then I think Marc Benioff with Agentforce was interesting because, if you're at Kubiya you're probably, "Ah, he's just taking our thing." He's validating agents. So I think you start to see the big adoption. IBM, Salesforce. Agents are here.

>> Yeah.

>> Teammates will be people and agents.

>> Correct.

>> That's going to be the key formula. The question is, what tasks do they do on the infrastructure? Where does that trust come in? Who decides that? That's going to be the big question.

>> Yeah. I fully agree, and we are working with our customers on defining that together with them. When you think about it, there's so many use cases that you could implement AI teammates. It's all about, where are you getting the most value out of it? Where is the ROI at the end of the day? Because that's a big question that's coming out now out of all these AI applications. Where is the ROI on it? And that's what we actually really focus on at Kubiya, is finding the right ROI.

>> Chris, final question for you: your job growth, what is your focus? What are you working on? What are the key things you're trying to knock down?

>> Yeah. We're working on growth just in general. New release of a product. We are releasing. We have a lot of announcements coming up. But our focus is of course new customers as always, but making sure that the customers we have, we are enabling them, that we're working with them. We're actually partnering up. I don't like to even call them our customers. They're our partners.

>> Yeah.

>> So we're really partnering up with them, testing out these different use cases with them, and making sure that we're providing as much value as possible, which is helping us also navigate our product.

>> Yeah. It's interesting, the word partnerships and ecosystem usually gets kicked around. I think now, with gen AI products and what you guys are doing and others we've been interviewing here, is that the intentions of the parties, they're much more intentional. That word's been kicked around a lot in conversations. We have in intentional relationship, because intentional means they're working together. There's less of just, hey, we're partnering. Whether it's go to market, selling together in market, one selling to the others, vice versa. But there's actually technical partnerships involved.

>> Yes.

>> Can you share any color on that?

>> Well, we can't share too much on it but we're doing a lot on that side with our partners. We are really aligning, like you said, with them deeply. And it's more about really having that, if you want to call it even an ecosystem, with our customers versus just being a vendor to them.

>> Okay. So final, final question: talk to the camera. Give the sales pitch, give the value proposition. Why should people work with Kubiya?

>> Well, what we're doing is we are really revolutionizing the way DevOps and infrastructure operations are being done today with the notion of delegating end-to-end tasks. Think about teams that, some of the use cases like JIRA ticket solving, which is always a big problem for any company. Think about your developer being able to come in the morning, open up the queue, and more than 50% of the JIRA tickets have been resolved by their AI teammate. So those are some of the values that we bring to the table amongst a lot of other use cases. But whoever's looking to scale their DevOps teams, their engineering teams without necessarily needing to scale headcount, that's where Kubiya comes into play.

>> Well, great to have you on theCUBE. First time on. Well done.

>> Appreciate it.

>> Shout out to Amit, the Kubiya team. They're in the Wired network, theCUBE, and NYSE. And a big fan of the company. Again, they're pre-series A, getting some great acceleration. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE here in our NYSE studio. One of two studios. The second one's being built out. But this is going to be our home here in New York City, as we bring our team here to Manhattan in New York City for founder coverage as well as wall-to-wall tech coverage. Thanks for watching.