AI Agent Development Tradeoffs You NEED to Know

MLOps.community · Advanced ·🤖 AI Agents & Automation ·9mo ago
Sherwood Callaway, tech lead at 11X, joins us to talk about building digital workers—specifically Alice (an AI sales rep) and Julian (a voice agent)—that are shaking up sales outreach by automating complex, messy tasks. He looks back on his YC days at OpKit, where he first got his hands dirty with voice AI, and compares the wild ride of building voice vs. text agents. We get into the use of Langgraph Cloud, integrating observability tools like Langsmith and Arize, and keeping hallucinations in check with regular Evals. Sherwood and Demetrios wrap up with a look ahead: will today's sprawling AI agent stacks eventually simplify? // Bio Sherwood Callaway is an emerging leader in the world of AI startups and AI product development. He currently serves as the first engineering manager at 11x, a series B AI startup backed by Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz, where he oversees technical work on "Alice", an AI sales rep that outperforms top human SDRs. Alice is an advanced agentic AI working in production and at scale. Under Sherwood’s leadership, the system grew from initial prototype to handling over 1 million prospect interactions per month across 300+ customers, leveraging partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and LangChain while maintaining consistent performance and reliability. Alice is now generating eight figures in ARR. Sherwood joined 11x in 2024 through the acquisition of his YC-backed startup, Opkit, where he built and commercialized one of the first-ever AI phone calling solutions for a specific industry vertical (healthcare). Prior to Opkit, he was the second infrastructure engineer at Brex, where he designed, built, and scaled the production infrastructure that supported Brex’s application and engineering org through hypergrowth. He currently lives in San Francisco, CA. // Related Links ~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~ Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.co
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1 Our 1st MLOps Meetup // Luke Marsden // MLOps Meetup #1
Our 1st MLOps Meetup // Luke Marsden // MLOps Meetup #1
MLOps.community
 2 Remote Collaboration as a Data Scientist
Remote Collaboration as a Data Scientist
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 3 MLOps Manifesto with Luke Marsden from Dotscience
MLOps Manifesto with Luke Marsden from Dotscience
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 4 MLOps lifecycle description
MLOps lifecycle description
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 5 What Does Best in Class AI/ML Governance Look Like in Fin Services? // Charles Radclyffe // MLOps #2
What Does Best in Class AI/ML Governance Look Like in Fin Services? // Charles Radclyffe // MLOps #2
MLOps.community
 6 Life purpose and too many spreadsheets
Life purpose and too many spreadsheets
MLOps.community
 7 Explainability, Black boxes and EU white paper on reproducibility
Explainability, Black boxes and EU white paper on reproducibility
MLOps.community
 8 Hierarchy of Machine Learning Needs // Phil Winder // MLOps Meetup #3
Hierarchy of Machine Learning Needs // Phil Winder // MLOps Meetup #3
MLOps.community
 9 Automatically Retrain Machine Learning Models? Are best practices worth it?
Automatically Retrain Machine Learning Models? Are best practices worth it?
MLOps.community
 10 Building an MLOps Team? Key ideas to keep in mind
Building an MLOps Team? Key ideas to keep in mind
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 11 Hierarchy of MLOps Needs
Hierarchy of MLOps Needs
MLOps.community
 12 Bare necessities for getting an ML model into production
Bare necessities for getting an ML model into production
MLOps.community
 13 MLOps and Monitoring
MLOps and Monitoring
MLOps.community
 14 How Phil Winder got into Data Science and Software Engineering
How Phil Winder got into Data Science and Software Engineering
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 15 Provenance and Reproducibility in Machine Learning; what is it and why you need it?
Provenance and Reproducibility in Machine Learning; what is it and why you need it?
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 16 Friction Between Data Scientists and Software Engineers
Friction Between Data Scientists and Software Engineers
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 17 MLOps Problems in different size companies
MLOps Problems in different size companies
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 18 ML tooling in large companies
ML tooling in large companies
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 19 ML Platforms - The build vs buy question
ML Platforms - The build vs buy question
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 20 ML Services Gateway at SurveyMonkey
ML Services Gateway at SurveyMonkey
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 21 Message buses, Async and sync architecture
Message buses, Async and sync architecture
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 22 MLOps #4: Shubhi Jain - Building an ML Platform @SurveyMonkey
MLOps #4: Shubhi Jain - Building an ML Platform @SurveyMonkey
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 23 Hybrid Data Science Teams @SurveyMonkey
Hybrid Data Science Teams @SurveyMonkey
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 24 How do you handle ML version control at SurveyMonkey
How do you handle ML version control at SurveyMonkey
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 25 Doing ML with Personal Information
Doing ML with Personal Information
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 26 Evolution of the ML feature store @SurveyMonkey
Evolution of the ML feature store @SurveyMonkey
MLOps.community
 27 Developing a Machine Learning Feature Store
Developing a Machine Learning Feature Store
MLOps.community
 28 Auto retrain ML models is not the question
Auto retrain ML models is not the question
MLOps.community
 29 3 key parts to Machine Learning monitoring
3 key parts to Machine Learning monitoring
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 30 MLOps Meetup #6: Mid-Scale Production Feature Engineering with Dr. Venkata Pingali
MLOps Meetup #6: Mid-Scale Production Feature Engineering with Dr. Venkata Pingali
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 31 MLOps meetup #5 High Stakes ML: Active Failures, Latent Factors with Flavio Clesio
MLOps meetup #5 High Stakes ML: Active Failures, Latent Factors with Flavio Clesio
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 32 MLOps: Airflow Pros and Cons
MLOps: Airflow Pros and Cons
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 33 Specific challenges in Machine Learning
Specific challenges in Machine Learning
MLOps.community
 34 Current State Of Machine Learning
Current State Of Machine Learning
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 35 Humans in the Loop are a defining factor in Machine Learning
Humans in the Loop are a defining factor in Machine Learning
MLOps.community
 36 Learning from real life Machine Learning failures
Learning from real life Machine Learning failures
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 37 Survivorship Bias in machine learning tutorials
Survivorship Bias in machine learning tutorials
MLOps.community
 38 Swiss Cheese model in Machine Learning
Swiss Cheese model in Machine Learning
MLOps.community
 39 Resume driven development in Machine learning & software engineering
Resume driven development in Machine learning & software engineering
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 40 Who has the highest standards in ML?
Who has the highest standards in ML?
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 41 Venkata Pingali of Scribble Data Thoughts on the Current State of Machine Learning
Venkata Pingali of Scribble Data Thoughts on the Current State of Machine Learning
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 42 Dependable data and being able to Trust in your Data with Venkata Pengali of Scribble Data
Dependable data and being able to Trust in your Data with Venkata Pengali of Scribble Data
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 43 Speed, Trust, Evolution and Scale in MLOps
Speed, Trust, Evolution and Scale in MLOps
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 44 More difficult transition for data scientists to become ML engineers
More difficult transition for data scientists to become ML engineers
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 45 How many models in prod til I need a dedicated ML platform?
How many models in prod til I need a dedicated ML platform?
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 46 Deeper thinking from data scientists around platform blackholes
Deeper thinking from data scientists around platform blackholes
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 47 Checkpointing, metadata, and confidence in your data
Checkpointing, metadata, and confidence in your data
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 48 Adjacent usecases and multistep feature engineering
Adjacent usecases and multistep feature engineering
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 49 Standardization of Machine Learning tools like in Software Engineering with Venkata Pingali
Standardization of Machine Learning tools like in Software Engineering with Venkata Pingali
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 50 Reproducability flaws in end to end Machine Learning debugging
Reproducability flaws in end to end Machine Learning debugging
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 51 3rd wave of data scientists
3rd wave of data scientists
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 52 MLOps meetup #7 Alex Spanos // TrueLayer 's MLOps Pipeline
MLOps meetup #7 Alex Spanos // TrueLayer 's MLOps Pipeline
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 53 MLOps Meetup #8 Optimizing Your ML Workflow with Kubeflow 1.0
MLOps Meetup #8 Optimizing Your ML Workflow with Kubeflow 1.0
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 54 Are Kubeflow and Airflow complementary?
Are Kubeflow and Airflow complementary?
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 55 Why Kubeflow gained so much traction=open community
Why Kubeflow gained so much traction=open community
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 56 Who decides the dirrection of Kubeflow
Who decides the dirrection of Kubeflow
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 57 What do Kubeflow and Arrikto do and how do they work together?
What do Kubeflow and Arrikto do and how do they work together?
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 58 Versioning your ML steps with Kubeflow
Versioning your ML steps with Kubeflow
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 59 Machine Learning Lifecycles//Perception vs Reality
Machine Learning Lifecycles//Perception vs Reality
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 60 Kubeflow vs SageMaker in Machine Learning
Kubeflow vs SageMaker in Machine Learning
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