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Ashwin Sreenivas

Co-founder & President, Decagon

Search every verified Ashwin Sreenivas interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ashwin Sreenivas, co-founder and president of Decagon, appeared on a panel at a September 2026 event moderated by Databricks co-founder Patrick Wendell, discussing AI agents for enterprise customer support. Sreenivas said Decagon builds AI agents for enterprises, focusing on performance-optimized versus cost-optimized approaches, and noted that token cost is the number one topic in his conversations with customers. He stated that Decagon offers an ROI guarantee of up to $10 million if customers do not get their money's worth, citing the company's active measurement of how much code reaches production and the human-level effort it would have taken. During the discussion, Sreenivas said Decagon uses roughly a dozen different model vendors or model families, with individual customers having their own restrictions, such as regional availability. He also referenced the "lump of labor fallacy," arguing that there is not a fixed amount of work in business-customer interactions, and that eliminating existing queues would not lead businesses to stop engaging with customers but rather to pursue a longer set of tasks.

Recent appearances

  • The New AI-Native Stack: Founders on Building Agents That Work at Enterprise Scale

    September 10, 2026 · 📺 Databricks Events

    AI agents are application-layer products, not base-model outputs—and the value being captured in the AI era comes from companies that solve enterprise governance, latency, cost, and multi-model orchestration on top of foundation models. This panel brings together founders of leading AI-native companies to explain why a base model alone does not solve enterprise problems, and what it actually takes to ship agents into production. Patrick Wendell (Databricks co-founder) moderates a conversation with Ashwin Sreenivas (Decagon, AI agents for enterprise customer support), TR Vishwanath (Glean, ent…

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  • How Decagon Runs 90% of Its Agents on Open-Source Models

    July 31, 2026 · 📺 a16z

    Sarah Wang and Kimberly Tan are joined by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, co-founders of Decagon, to discuss the evolution of enterprise AI agents, why the company increasingly relies on open-source models, and how it is helping some of the world’s largest companies deploy AI in production. Decagon has become one of the fastest-growing AI companies by building agents that automate customer support, sales, and operational workflows. Jesse, Decagon’s CEO, and Ashwin, its president, explain how the company is building enterprise AI at scale. They unpack why Decagon moved most of its inference…

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  • AI's Dropout Problem: Why the Best Agents Never Stop Learning | Decagon | RAISE Summit 2026

    July 20, 2026 · 📺 RAISE Summit

    Ashwin Sreenivas, President & Co-Founder of Decagon, joins CNBC's Arjun Kharpal on why the best AI agents never stop learning — and how enterprises are moving from pilots to production-grade AI in customer-facing roles. Recorded live on the Master Stage at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, on July 8, 2026.Livestream powered by Cursor. RAISE Summit is Europe's leading AI gathering, bringing together 9,000+ founders, executives, investors, researchers and policymakers. Learn more: https://www.raisesummit.com Subscribe for every session from RAISE Summit 2026.

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  • A conversation with Julia Hartz & Ashwin Sreenivas

    July 02, 2026 · 📺 Decagon AI

    Julia Hartz spent 20 years building Eventbrite through every major dislocation of the modern internet – the 2008 financial crisis (which nearly killed the company before it had ten employees), the 2018 IPO, COVID (which wiped out 90% of revenue overnight), and the 2025 sale to Bending Spoons that brought her run as CEO to an end. Through all of it, she built a company with a distinctive culture and a single mission that didn't change for two decades: bring the world together through live experiences. Ashwin Sreenivas is the co-founder and President of Decagon, valued at $4.5B three years afte…

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  • The AI founder advice you won’t hear on X | Ashwin Sreenivas (Co-Founder at Decagon)

    May 19, 2026 · 📺 Knuckle Up with Nakul

    Ashwin Sreenivas spent his childhood in India waking up at 5am and studying until 8:30 at night. History, geography, physics, chemistry, math. Every day, from 4th grade through 12th grade, through the Olympiads and the National Talent Search Exam. He says now, three years into building one of the most exciting AI-native companies in the world, that all of that is precisely why what he does today feels almost easy. “I get to come in here and there’s a lot of people and I’m having fun.” That mode is what Decagon runs on. The company Ashwin co-founded with Jesse Zhang in 2023 is now valued at $4…

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  • Automating Enterprise Customer Support Workflows with Decagon AI | Ashwin Sreenivas

    November 23, 2025 · 📺 Startup Project — AI Startups w/ PMF

    In this episode, Nataraj chats with Ashwin Srinivas, co-founder of Decagon AI, about revolutionizing enterprise customer support with AI. Decagon AI, valued at $1.5 billion, uses AI agents to handle customer interactions across chat, phone, SMS, and email. Ashwin discusses the evolution from decision-tree chatbots to AI concierges and highlights Decagon AI's unique AOP approach, emphasizing seamless, personalized customer experiences. Learn how Decagon AI is driving tangible business impact and transforming customer support. What you’ll learn Understand how Decagon AI is transforming cust…

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  • The Best Ideas Still Come from Talking to Humans

    November 17, 2025 · 📺 Chemistry Ventures

    In this episode, Kristina Shen (Managing Partner, Chemistry) interviews Ashwin Sreenivas (CTO & Co-founder, Decagon) about how conversational AI can enhance customer engagement and simplify support operations for businesses. Ashwin recounts the origins of Decagon and the co-founder chemistry that made it possible. The conversation explores how great teams navigate the idea maze with speed, conviction, and a sharp focus on building something customers truly need—and will pay for. And in a world increasingly shaped by AI, Ashwin makes a compelling case for the most timeless principle of all: sp…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →