Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises

Companies are rushing AI agents into production — and many of them will fail. But the reason has nothing to do with their AI models.

On day two of VB Transform 2025, industry leaders shared hard-won lessons from deploying AI agents at scale. A panel moderated by Joanne Chen, general partner at Foundation Capital, included Shawn Malhotra, CTO at Rocket Companies, which uses agents across the home ownership journey from mortgage underwriting to customer chat; Shailesh Nalawadi, head of product at Sendbird, which builds agentic customer service experiences for companies across multiple verticals; and Thys Waanders, SVP of AI transformation at Cognigy, whose platform automates customer experiences for large enterprise contact centers.

Their shared discovery: Companies that build evaluation and orchestration infrastructure first are successful, while those rushing to production with powerful models fail at scale.

>>See all our Transform 2025 coverage here<<

The ...