AI Engineering

In a recent conversation, Ritendra Datta, VP of AI at Eightfold, gave a fresh perspective on AI development. With his extensive background leading AI teams of all sizes—from small pods to over 200 engineers and researchers—across Google, Facebook & Databricks, Ritendra brings a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t in building AI systems at scale. This is a refreshingly take: all of AI development can be seen through two lenses—Fast AI and Slow AI. ...

The Real Challenge in Building AI Agents Isn’t the AI - It’s Everything Else The AI industry has a marketing problem. We’ve become so infatuated with the “intelligence” in artificial intelligence that we’ve forgotten the most important truth about building agentic AI systems: 90% of the work is software engineering, and only 10% is actually about the AI model itself. This isn’t just a hot take - it’s a hard-learned lesson from intense 11 months of building AI interview and agentic systems at Eightfold AI, where this realisation became both the problem statement and a career pivot. While everyone’s debating which foundation model has the highest benchmark scores, the real battles are being fought in error handling, state management, and API integrations. ...