Descriptions:
James Reggio, CTO of Brex — the corporate spend management platform recently acquired by Capital One for approximately $5 billion — joins Latent Space to discuss how Brex has approached AI adoption across the organization. Rather than picking a single platform winner, Brex deliberately maintains a multi-vendor AI strategy that lets employees self-select their preferred tools — from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for chat, to Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code for development — tracking aggregate usage data to inform contract renewals and vendor negotiations.
Reggio outlines Brex’s three-pillar AI framework: corporate AI (adopting tooling across all business functions to increase efficiency), operational AI (reducing costs inherent to operating as a financial institution), and product AI (building features that position Brex itself as part of customers’ own AI strategies). He describes how Conductor One in Slack acts as a self-service gateway for employees to provision whichever stack they prefer, and how usage trends shift noticeably every few months.
The conversation also covers the human side of enterprise AI rollout: the challenge 12–18 months ago of getting engineers to try new workflows at all, versus today’s challenge of getting comfortable engineers to keep experimenting as better tools emerge. Reggio’s background as a repeat founder and his path from mobile engineering leadership to CTO gives useful context to his perspective on AI-driven organizational transformation inside a high-growth fintech.
📺 Source: Latent Space · Published January 17, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
