Cooking with fire without burning down the kitchen: Dominik Kundel

Over the last 2 years the capabilities of LLM have been developing at a rapid pace and R&D organizations in almost every industry are expected to determine their "AI strategy" while balancing existing non-AI customer needs and a tighter financial environment. For some, recent AI developments might even pose a disruptive shift for their products and company, but how do you balance rapid prototyping and exploration of these disruptive technologies with catering to your current user base to avoid the Innovator's Dilemma? Should you add AI to every product team's roadmap or form a dedicated AI team? How do you experiment with entirely new AI endeavors without risking your current customer base? In other words, how do you cook with fire without burning down the kitchen? In this discussion round, Dominik Kundel will share how Twilio has been tackling some of these challenges, their learnings and what changes/iterations they have been going through to address those learnings, followed by an open discussion for others to share their learnings. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Dominik Dominik leads Product for the Emerging Tech & Innovation organization at Twilio. His team builds next gen prototypes and iterates quickly to help craft the long term product vision and explore the impact of autonomous agents & AGI on customer engagement. Deeply passionate about the Developer Experience, he’s a JavaScript enthusiast who’s integrated it into everything from CLIs to coffee machines. Catch his tweets @dkundel and his side ventures in cocktails, food and photography.