Chief Commercial Officer, Mayfield | Empowering Entrepreneurs to Scale Successful Ventures | Accelerating Product-Market Fit and Early Customer Adoption | Connecting CIOs, CTOs, and CXOs to Drive Corporate Innovation
Last week, I had the privilege of co-hosting a Jeffersonian-style dinner at the Village Pub in Woodside with BlueRock Security and 20 brilliant VPs of Engineering. The conversation surfaced some surprising and provocative insights. Here are 7 takeaways that stood out: 1️⃣ Gemini is winning in the enterprise. Many expected OpenAI to dominate, but engineering leaders are leaning toward Google’s Gemini for enterprise trust and integration. 2️⃣ Agentic AI is being broken into business tasks. From contracts to risk assessment, leaders are decomposing work into agent-sized blocks connected by orchestration layers like MCP. 3️⃣ The “two-lane strategy” is here. Teams are running an express lane for quick internal adoption and a main lane for higher-risk, customer-facing apps. 4️⃣ Security & identity are the gating factors. Okta doesn’t map to agents, API keys are too broad, and agent-to-agent security remains unsolved. 5️⃣ AI-assisted coding is insecure by default. Unless prompts explicitly demand security, vulnerabilities proliferate. Prompt engineering is quickly becoming a core developer skill. 6️⃣ MCP is contested infrastructure. Some call it a dressed-up API gateway; others see the foundation of a “DNS for agents” that will require new governance. 7️⃣ The ADLC (Agent Development Life Cycle) is emerging. Planning horizons are shrinking (6 quarters → 1), and leaders are already experimenting with rating, ranking, and decommissioning agents. Big thanks to Bob Tinker, Harold Byun, and Josh Dobies of BlueRock Security, and to this incredible group of engineering leaders who brought candor, curiosity, and vision to the table: Amit Jain, Anshu Narula, Geeta Pyne, Gopinath Rebala, Itay Bleier, Neeraj Gupta, Panteha Healey, Peter Albert, Satish Mohan, Shishir Sharma, Simon Raveh, Siying Yang, Sumanth Sukumar, Swarup Pogalur, Vijay R., Vikash Chauhan, and Vinod Marur At Mayfield, we’re committed to convening these conversations at the intersection of AI, security, and engineering leadership. Excited to see where this community takes the conversation next.
Really good takeaways.
Thanks Gamiel Gran for organizing and hosting the event. It was a great mix of peers from diverse industry segments. I was amazed to see how established enterprises have jumped in and embraced this AI wave instead of sitting on sidelines waiting for all answers.
Gamiel - thanks for sharing these takeaways!
Gamiel Gran - Thank you for organizing such an insightful event. It was valuable to hear directly from enterprise leaders about adoption trends and the challenges they face. What stood out most is how quickly AI is being adopted across enterprises, at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before, even with ongoing concerns around hallucination, security, compliance, and regulation.
📣 Conversations like this one show just how quickly the ground is shifting for engineering leadership. From AI trust and integration choices, to the realities of securing agent-to-agent interactions, it’s clear we’re entering a new era. Architecture, security, and developer productivity need to be reimagined together. Thanks to Gamiel and the Mayfield Team for co-hosting this event with BlueRock, and to this brilliant group of leaders for leaning in with insight and candor.
Great insights here Gamiel!
Great set of insights Gamiel Gran. Thanks for sharing.
CTO @ Altruist, on a mission making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to everyone
5dGamiel Gran thanks for holding a great event filled with practical insights and diverse approaches as we grapple with emerging AI tools for solving business problems.