YouSaid · the spoken record

George Fraser

lines on the record
72
first
2026-06-05
most recent
2026-06-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “It's interesting because they were getting better, and I've sensed in the last few years that there's sort of two camps within SAP, one of whom who regards it as it's the customer's data, the customer's got to be able to do what they need to do with their own data. And then there's sort of the old guard who views it as SAP's data and you'll do with it what we tell you to.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so we score. The list is growing. We're trying to make it as long as possible. We score as many vendors as we've been able to catalog so far on their data access policies. So we basically score them on whether they try to charge egress charges, whether they try to make you pay for getting your own data out, whether they Whether they make it impossible to get a complete copy of your data because some vendors will do that or they'll make it just very difficult. And whether they have terms of use restrictions on accessing your own data. So there's a big grid on there and it rates. Are you comfortable saying that?”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, six months ago was when I was trained. I don't know anything after that because I'm not connected to the internet. That is what using today's AIs is like if you're using them in a business context and they don't have access to your business data. And so it's very important for every company who wants to do things with data to create their own data platform where they have a copy of all of their own data and it's being kept continuously up to date. And anytime vendors start putting up barriers, it just makes it harder to get that done. And the customers will still do it. They'll just work around these barriers at great cost and complexity.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, the reason it's bad for customers anytime vendors put up walls and try to regulate data access is that you need to have all your data in one place in order to do meaningful reporting, in order to understand as what the heck is going on in your business, and in order for AI agents to work in the context of business. If you don't do that, then it's using ChatGPT from before ChatGPT was connected to the internet. If you used it back then, you remember it used to have this knowledge cut off, and it would tell you I can only answer questions that happened in my training window. Six against.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Who are both 5 tram customers, and we replicate lots of data from these various SaaS tools on their behalf into their data lakes. If they're still using them, do we really think the company of the future is not going to be?”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I mean, famously, all the big AI labs, including Andreessen Horowitz, and we're all very heavy users of AI, like still use these SaaS tools. And so four years into this, we don't have a lot of evidence that like.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I completely agree, and I will point out another piece of evidence for that claim, which is if you look at the budgets of real companies that are heavy consumers of software, they spend five to ten percent of headcount on software. Software costs are immaterial in the grand scheme of things. Software compared to everything else a typical business spends money on is so cheap. The idea that they're going to use AI to value engineer the number of seats they have on Slack or something is ridiculous. They're going to use AI to go make their business work better in whatever it is that they do. They're not trying to take that 5% software spend and turn it into four and a half. That is not the highest best use of AI.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I just want to let you know I am old enough to remember these discussions in the 90s. The rhetoric was exactly the same. The reactor exactly said we could never open up APIs. We can never let them do this because they're going to disintermediate us. And it just turns out that if you're buying into a business process, like the operational flow of something, that is set up by the company that you're buying it from. Salesforce knows how to run a Salesforce. And so whether it's an agent that's consuming it or SaaS, I would argue that there's still the value there.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Trying to defend a position that I think is stupid. So, I think a lot of these threats are not new. Like, well, maybe they'll use programmatic access and thereby use less seats. Maybe they'll move some functionality to their own interfaces. I mean, that is a real thing that has been happening. I want to let you know.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I'm going to keep poking on this because I still think it's not a real concern. So let me make another argument. So let's say you had opened up all your APIs in the 90s, which is the case. Why couldn't I just write a procedural app, which is my own version of this AS, and therefore also disintermediate your SAS? Like, why are agents somehow different than me just writing my own software or my own dashboard?”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And their customers have been using them and depending on them for decades. And those same APIs are the primary target of AI agents. So it is very hard to differentiate whether the users are accessing the APIs in the same way that they always have been or whether they are accessing them in agentic ways that may substitute for human workflows.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Agents don't need as many individual identities. When you have AI agents accessing systems, you really just need roles. You don't need the same granularity of users. If you have many product managers, each will have their own identity in a system. But if you have a product manager bought, you really might just have one role that it uses. And it might have a single identity and yet do the work of hundreds or thousands of people. So there's not an easy answer like that. Furthermore, these companies have a history of having open APIs, open APIs are a good thing. If these companies did not have open APIs, they would have been consigned to the dustbin of legacy SaaS decades ago. I mean, this is a thing that happened in the 90s, right? The evolution of open APIs.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think people are worried that their systems that they've spent many years building will simply be less valuable in a world where their users are no longer humans, but they're agents. I think they're worried that”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Can you just straw man the set of concerns? Because this is one of the biggest reactions I've seen in the industry in a very long time. And I'm kind of trying to come to grips with what the actual worry is.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That's right. Very few people are in the business of training their own models. Most people, when they want to access their own data in their own systems of record, even if those systems of record are managed by vendors, they are using it for context. They're using it in order to ask and answer questions about what's going on in their business.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I just want to tease us apart because I think there's a lot of confusion on what exactly is going on, right? So this is locking down access to the data that an agent would use instead of an app, right? It's not access to data because you're going to train your own model.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “To think that a great strategy for dealing with AI might be to lock it out and to say your data is our data now and you can't take it elsewhere. And if you want to use AI on it, you have to use the AI tools that we provide. Notably just a couple weeks ago, SAP announced a new API policy that literally said all AI agent access was banned except in a way specifically approved by SAP. Now, if you're an SAP user, don't panic. This is just a policy. You have contracts with SAP. Those are authoritative as to what you are and are allowed to do. So don't overreact to these policy memos, but it just shows how extreme the reaction of some of these companies has been.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “The thing about data in the context of business is it is always born somewhere else. It's always born in systems of record like Salesforce, like Workday, like SAP. And even if it's your own applications data, if you're a software company and you run your own database, the data is born in that database. And since, as I said, time immemorial, businesses have had the need for internal use to centralize a copy of all their data in another location. It doesn't work to just go and do all of your reporting and ask all your questions in each system individually, some kinds of questions require you to look across the entire system. And so that is not new. However, these AI agents are new, and there has been in the last year a reaction, which really started with the stock market, as we saw the SaaS apocalypse happen, and as we saw the stock prices of all these systems of record that I'm talking about, plummet, people viewed them as under threat from AIs, we have seen some of these companies start.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, exactly. I've been doing this long enough that a slide about the past state in my own slides is the same slide as the future state from when I started. What 5Train does is we help our customers get all of their data from all their systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, all their SaaS tools, their own databases into one place, getting all your data in one place is not a new thing. Businesses have had the need to do this since filing cabinets. The primary reason historically that people used FiveDran to get all their data in one place was to do business intelligence, was to build reports about things like what's your revenue, what's going on with your sales team, what are we forecasting for this quarter, all those great things. And now there is a new reason to have all your data in one place, which is if you want to use AI agents in business, AI agents need context. And it turns out that the same data foundations that work well for business intelligence and reporting with some additions and some modifications actually can work really well for AI agents as well.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “For years, companies built data infrastructure to answer questions about the business. Now, they're building it for AI. As agents become more capable, the challenge is no longer collecting data. It's making sure the right systems can access the right context at the right time. That shift is forcing companies to rethink everything from data platforms and APIs to enterprise software and systems of record. Martine Casado speaks with FiveTran co-founder and CEO George Frasier about AI, data infrastructure, and why the next wave of enterprise software may look very different from the last.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We'll actually have an HR and that HR team will onboard AIs as they come. They'll be part of teams that will join the Slack. And in that world, these aren't software that's actually more seats, more consumption of software. And so do you think that for enterprise agents, we're moving more to these, you treat them like humans, or do you think that that's too far?”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “There is a new reason to have all your data in one place, which is AI agents need context. If you don't do that, then it's sort of like using ChatGPT from before ChatGPT was connected to the internet. Postgres, contrary to popular belief, is very old technology. It is not a good database simply because it was written a long time ago. It has a lot of technical debt.”

    2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source