Build your own company brain: the enterprise AI playbook from Stripe’s engineering team | Sharadh Krishnamurthy

Stripe’s internal AI agent, Kai, serves as a company-wide "brain" designed to scale AI productivity while maintaining strict governance and security. By leveraging a project-based architecture, the system enforces granular control over tool access, token usage, and data privacy, ensuring that sensitive workflows remain protected. Key features include a context-aware engine that understands organizational hierarchy and a skill-building platform that allows employees to create, share, and iterate on automated workflows. Engineering manager Sharadh Krishnamurthy emphasizes that foundational investments in developer experience and data infrastructure are critical for agentic success, enabling the system to handle high-volume queries without compromising core systems. This approach empowers thousands of employees with AI tools while minimizing the risks of rogue agents and uncontrolled infrastructure load, demonstrating how enterprise-scale AI requires robust, purpose-built guardrails to remain effective.