If anyone can demo an agent, what’s stopping them?

Swami Chandrasekaran has worked through four generations of AI. The demo, he argues, is the easy part. What comes after it is where most programs quietly stall.

Guest

Swami Chandrasekaran

Partner & AI Leader, KPMG

Leads KPMG’s move from AI experimentation to scale, from productizing professional services to building an agent ecosystem. Built an agent harness from scratch to learn how they really work.

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Anirudh Narayan

Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Lyzr

Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Lyzr. He built Agent Sam, the AI agent that pitched Lyzr to its Series A investors.

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Must watch if your agent demo went well and nothing has happened since.

Chapters

Orange dot marks a key moment

Swami Chandrasekaran and Anirudh Narayan on How We Agent, episode 7: KPMG

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Five moments worth pressing play for

Short on time? Pick up where you want.

Moment 01

He built the agent harness himself

Instead of reading about frameworks, Swami built one. That’s what cut through the vocabulary treadmill and showed him what to build and what to buy.

Read about the frameworkBuild the harness yourself
Moment 02

One mandate, three jobs

How the AI function inside KPMG is actually scoped:
- Innovate
- Enable
- Standardize
Moment 03

What gets a startup through the door

Swami is blunt about how KPMG picks who to build with. Three things decide it:
- Journey partnerSomeone who evolves with us, not a one-off vendor.
- Differentiated techSomething a me-too product can’t copy next quarter.
- Taste the ice creamThe nerve to let an enterprise actually use the thing.
Moment 04

Scale, security, trust: the last 40%

The stretch between a working demo and a system people rely on is where most programs stall. It’s mostly not a model problem.

The last 40% is where the real work happens: security, trust, scale and actual adoption.
Moment 05

Trust is what builds adoption

Nobody uses an agent they don’t trust, however good the benchmark looks. Swami closes on what that means for the next generation of builders.