The a16z Show · Friday, October 2, 2026
Vlad Kyle of Leo discusses how they build trust for their AI agents, especially for autonomous negotiations. He explains that no enterprise starts with fully autonomous agents from day one due to a lack of trust in both the company and the technology. Leo uses a 'human-in-the-loop' approach, feeding the agent feedback and learnings to gradually increase trust for larger negotiations.
“And we as a startup, scale-up, we have to earn the trust. Incomments already have the trust, but this also means they can destroy the trust if they ship something too early and the product maybe doesn't work or it's bad or it works decisions in a bad way.”
“So we have like a very easy approach of like having a human in the loop. And this is like, extremely helpful for us because we see, like we have like, let's say like the perfect negotiation agent, which is like overall the perfect procurement negotiator, but we don't know exactly how a Fortune 10 enterprise, like the specific Fortune 10 enterprise operates.”
“And by having this human in the loop approach, we are feeding our agent with all the feedback and all the learnings. And then they suddenly trust us for like 10K negotiations, 20K negotiations, 100K negotiations.”