Durable Execution and the Infrastructure Powering AI Agents

Raghu Raghuram, Managing Partner at a16z, and Sarah Wang, General Partner at a16z, speak with Samar Abbas, CEO of Temporal, about how durable execution became the infrastructure layer behind some of the world’s most widely used AI agents. They cover why long-running agents require state management and recoverability, how Temporal powers OpenAI’s Codex and Snap’s Story processing, and why the shift from interactive to background agents is creating distributed systems challenges at a scale that didn’t exist two years ago. Resources: Follow Samar Abbas: https://x.com/SamarAtTemporal Follow Sarah Wang: https://x.com/sarahdingwang Follow Raghu Raghuram: https://x.com/RaghuRaghuram Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.