Subvolts take Block's CTO shares how AI agents boost enterprise productivity and why small AI swarms will win. Sep 30, 2025 - Developers
- Learn how Block uses an open-source agent to connect enterprise tools and build custom applications without code.
- Business
- Discover how to reorganize teams for AI adoption and achieve significant engineer time savings through automation.
This is a solid interview with a CTO from a major company discussing practical AI implementation and future research directions.
Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent
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From Subvolts
Summary and analysis by Subvolts editorial, AI-assisted.
Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna joins Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast to discuss building AI-first enterprises. He details how Block engineers save 8-10 hours weekly using their open-source agent, Goose, which connects to existing tools. Prasanna explains their organizational shift to functional teams and why swarms of smaller AI models may outperform large ones.
Block's CTO explains how their company uses a special AI tool called Goose to help employees automate tasks and save time. He believes many small AI programs working together will be better than one giant AI for building new things.
This episode offers insights into practical enterprise AI adoption and the potential of decentralized AI architectures. It's for business leaders and engineers looking to implement AI automation and understand future AI trends beyond monolithic LLMs. Block's approach to open-sourcing their agent and their focus on swarm intelligence connect to current industry discussions on developer tools and model architectures, areas actively explored by frontier labs.
- HostSequoia Capital
- GuestDhanji PrasannaCTO, Block
- Guest: Dhanji Prasanna, CTO of Block
- Show: Training Data (Sequoia Capital)
- Length: 60 minutes
- Engineer Time Savings: 8-10 hours per week
- Open Source Agent: Goose
- AI Model Future: Swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs
As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block reorganized from business unit silos to functional teams to accelerate AI adoption, why they chose to open-source their most valuable AI tool and why he believes swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in the episode:
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goose: Block’s open-source, general-purpose AI agent used across the company to orchestrate workflows via tools and APIs.
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Model Context Protocol (MCP): Open protocol (spearheaded by Anthropic) for connecting AI agents to tools; goose was an early adopter and helped shape.
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bitchat: Decentralized chat app written by Jack Dorsey
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Swarm intelligence: Research direction Dhanji highlights for AI’s future where many agents (geese) collaborate to build complex software beyond a single-agent copilot.
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Travelling Salesman Problem: Classic optimization problem cited by Dhanji in the context of a non-technical user of goose solving a practical optimization task.
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Amara’s Law: The idea, originated by futurist Roy Amara in 1978, that we overestimate tech impact short term and underestimate long term.
00:00 Introduction
01:48 AI: Friend or Foe?
03:13 Block's Journey with AI and Technology
04:47 Block's Diverse Product Range
07:04 Driving AI at Block
14:28 The Evolution of Goose
27:45 Integrating Goose with Existing Systems
28:23 Goose's Learning and Recipe Feature
29:41 Tool Use and LLM Providers
31:40 Impact of AI on Developer Productivity
34:37 Block's Commitment to Open Source
39:09 Future of AI and Swarm Intelligence
43:05 Remote Work at Block
45:15 Vibe Coding and AI in Development
48:43 Making Goose More Accessible
51:28 Generative AI in Customer-Facing Products
54:09 Design and Engineering at Block
55:38 Predictions for the Future of AI
- LLMs
- Dhanji Prasanna
- Large Language Models, powerful AI systems trained on vast amounts of text.
- MCP
- Dhanji Prasanna
- Model Context Protocol, a system for connecting AI agents to different software tools.
- Swarm intelligence
- Dhanji Prasanna
- The idea of many small AI agents collaborating to achieve complex tasks.
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Questions people ask
- How much time do Block engineers save with AI?
- Block engineers save 8-10 hours per week through AI automation using their internal tools.
- What is Goose?
- Goose is Block's open-source, general-purpose AI agent that connects to enterprise tools and APIs to orchestrate workflows.
Page generated Oct 19, 2026. Summaries are Subvolts' own; the audio, artwork and notes belong to Sequoia Capital.