Staging environment

Challenges and Learnings For Org-Wide AI-Native Adoption

Hosted by Mihail Eric, Nils Widal, and Hannah Henderson

149 students

In this video

What you'll learn

How adoption differs by scale

What an early-stage CTO can mandate overnight vs what an engineering manager at an established company has to negotiate.

Challenges of pushing AI adoption org-wide

Review bottlenecks, security surprises, and cultural resistance hit in practice, and how to resolve them

Where to start in your own org

The first 30 days of an AI-native push including important tooling and policy decisions

Why this topic matters

Every engineering org is under pressure to adopt AI, but most attempts stall: tools get bought, a few engineers go deep, and nothing changes org-wide. The gap isn't the technology, it's the org design, governance, and culture around it. In this panel, two AI-native engineering leaders will share what actually worked, what failed, and what they'd do differently.

You'll learn from

Mihail Eric

Head of AI at Monaco, Creator of Stanford's AI Coding Course

I’m Head of AI at Monaco, a startup building the future AI-powered revenue platform for GTM teams, backed by Human Capital, Benchmark, and Founders Fund. I'm also an adjunct professor at Stanford, where I created and teach "The Modern Software Developer", the university's first course on AI software development. I've trained hundreds of engineers on AI coding principles and have advised dozens of global software teams including Amazon, Allianz Global, Upstart, and more.

In past lives, I was a technical lead at Amazon Alexa where I built the first LLMs for the organization. I also founded a YC-backed AI coding company. Before that I started Confetti AI, a machine learning education startup that trained thousands of students globally and that I led until its acquisition in 2022.

Nils Widal

Nils Widal is CTO of Cara and founding CTO of Aytza, building HIPAA-compliant AI

Nils Widal is the technical co-founder and CTO of Cara, a HIPAA-compliant AI infrastructure platform for healthcare delivery organizations, and founding CTO of Aytza, an AI-native strategy consulting firm helping healthcare leaders navigate high-stakes decisions like market entry, commercialization, and M&A. He's spent 7+ years in healthtech, previously building for startups like Truepill or SteadyMD, and Fortune 500 payors and pharma companies. Nils is known for his hands-on work with agentic coding, including the failsafe medical triage agents paper and a how he shipped 66 tickets autonomously, his open-source Codex & Claude Code harness for healthcare compliance (HIPAA, HITRUST, ISO 27001, SOC 2). He writes about clinical AI safety and healthtech engineering.

Hannah Henderson

Senior Engineering Manager at Honeycomb leading Growth and Agentic Intelligence

Hannah Henderson is a Senior Engineering Manager at Honeycomb, where she leads the Growth and Agentic Intelligence teams. Her work explores how AI is reshaping software engineering: how engineers build and grow, what they and their agents create, and how they understand the systems they operate.

Hannah transitioned into tech from mechanical engineering and has over a decade of experience building products and engineering teams. She has worked on everything from satellites and skyscrapers to developer tools at Honeycomb, CircleCI, Transcend, and Lockheed Martin.

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Go deeper with a course

Building an AI-Native Engineering Team
Mihail Eric
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