90% of AI prototypes never reach production (w/ Temporal’s Samar Abbas) | AI Basics

Summary

Jason Calacanis interviews Samar Abbas, co-founder and CEO of Temporal, about why AI prototypes often fail in production. Abbas explains that durable execution, harnesses, and visibility are needed for reliable agents that run longer and take real-world actions. They discuss enterprise adoption, security guardrails, and Temporal's role in the agentic stack.

• Most AI prototypes die after proof of concept due to reliability, durability, and scalability gaps.
• As agents run longer and take real-world actions, durable execution and failure recovery become table stakes.
• Temporal provides a durable execution platform with state recovery and full visibility into agent workflows.
• A harness separates the agent's brain from the loop, enabling coordination across distributed tools and agents.
• Enterprises require sandboxes, memory, and guardrails before adopting agentic architectures at scale.
• Code-mode agents that generate and execute code at runtime create new security challenges.
• Jason promotes temporal.io and thanks Google Cloud for sponsoring the AI Basics series.