The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agents

Everyone can build an AI agent. Almost nobody knows how to run thousands of them safely in production. Over the past two years, we've watched AI agents evolve from demos into software that writes code, answers customers, automates workflows, and makes decisions. The challenge has shifted from building smarter agents to operating them reliably at scale. Having spent time at Meta and Google and now helping lead Guild.ai, CTO and co-founder Chris Waterson has seen firsthand where production systems fail. It's rarely the model. It's the surrounding infrastructure: context management, permissions, observability, cost controls, versioning, evaluation, and governance. This session explores what changes when AI agents become real production systems instead of prototypes. He'll draw on lessons from building Guild Software Factory, a system of specialized agents that plans, implements, reviews, and maintains work across a codebase, and Guild Optimizer, which automatically tests cheaper agent configurations against production history to cut costs without sacrificing quality. Attendees will leave with practical frameworks for designing AI agent systems that are observable, secure, reusable, and capable of evolving over time, not just impressive during a demo. Whether you're building your first agent or managing hundreds across an organization, this talk offers lessons from operating AI where reliability matters.