The a16z Show · Friday, July 31, 2026
For growth-stage companies like Decagon, performance, latency, and accuracy are the primary drivers for AI model selection, rather than immediate cost savings. Ashwin Srinivasa notes that while cost benefits are a nice side effect of using open-source models, the focus remains on optimizing the agent's performance for customer satisfaction.
“Performance, latency, and accuracy is definitely the driving factor for most of this. Right?”
“Cost is a nice benefit in that, you know, surprisingly, this is one of the few tasks where you kind of get all three things. It is better at the task, it is cheaper, and it is faster.”
“Our, our highest priority is just growing. And when you're talking to a customer, they don't really care about what your costs are. They just care about how well your agent performs.”