Emily Sands @emilygsands · Jul 30
“Coding agents transformed engineering at Stripe, but non-engineers like sales reps, finance analysts, technical account managers, and others felt left behind by the AI wave of Claude Code and Codex… That all changed when we shipped Stripe’s knowledge AI agent.”
Emily Sands, who leads Data & AI at Stripe, shared a post about Kai, an AI agent Stripe created for employees who aren’t engineers. This includes sales reps, finance analysts, and technical account managers, people who saw engineers get tools like Claude Code and Codex and felt left out.
Stripe created a platform called AgentStudio, where each team, like finance, GTM, and legal, builds and manages its own skills. For example, the people who know how to handle billing issues are in finance, not on the AI team. The AI team’s job was to build the platform, while the actual skills remain with the experts who already do the work.
This is a common problem: knowledge is often held by just a few people, while routine tasks take up time that could be used for more important work. Stripe could fix this because they have a full engineering team to build something like Kai from scratch. Most companies don’t have that advantage.
This is the direction we are heading with Skills and Agents. We believe every organization, team, and knowledge worker should have tools and helpers that automate their work, adding AI support while keeping what humans do best for humans: judgment.
If you’re thinking about how to start, here are some first steps:
- Find a few repetitive tasks or processes in a team that take a lot of time.
- Talk to the people who do this work every day to learn about their needs and problems.
- Work with your AI Support Team (if you don’t have one, contact us) to look at AI helper tools that could help.
- Try a small test with one workflow, check its results, and improve from there.
These first steps can help your organization start getting value from AI.
For more on how we build the platform underneath this, read The Knowledge Harness: Making Your Company AI-Native.