Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast · Latent.Space

Brex’s AI Hail Mary — With CTO James Reggio

·1 hr 13 min·5 clips

Brex pairs 20-year-old AI natives with staff engineers to build agentic finance tools no one else dreams of.

Latent Space hosts Alessio and Swyx interview James Reggio, CTO of Brex, the corporate finance platform serving roughly 40,000 companies from Fortune 100 down to startups. Reggio comes from a rare background: a mobile engineering leader who became CTO, a path he attributes less to technical depth and more to founder experience at multiple companies. Brex has a recruiting slogan called 'Quitters Welcome,' explicitly celebrating that many employees leave to become founders or department heads elsewhere. The episode digs into Brex's AI transformation following a First Round Capital article and a tweet from Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi claiming 5x growth acceleration and 99 percent burn reduction over 18 months. Reggio describes three AI strategy pillars: corporate AI (AI tooling across all business functions to 10x workflows), operational AI (buying and building solutions to reduce costs as a financial institution), and product AI (features that make Brex itself part of customers' AI strategies). The AI team is deliberately structured as a startup within Brex: about 10 people in tight three-person pods, each consisting of a product/customer-focused person, a staff engineer who knows the Brex codebase and can navigate existing systems, and a young AI-native engineer who approaches problems from an AI-first lens without preconceptions. Reggio argues that too much experience can be an impediment to AI-first thinking. The team operates from geographically distributed locations including Seattle, New York, and Sao Paulo, with Friday evening demo sessions for executive review. The architectural approach uses an LLM gateway as the core infrastructure layer, with an MCP layer on top for model context protocol integration. Reggio discusses the challenge of building agentic finance products — agents that can take actions on financial systems — and the trust and safety considerations this requires. The tone is technical, startup-culture-aware, and candid about both successes and tradeoffs. The audience is AI engineers, engineering leaders, and founders interested in enterprise AI implementation.

As heard by us

Brex treats AI as a buying, operating, and product problem.

Brex's AI strategy comes through as an operating model rather than a slogan. The piece traces three pillars: company-wide AI adoption, internal systems meant to lower the cost of running a financial institution, and product features that can fold Brex into a customer's own…

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Why you'd press play

You get Brex's AI buying playbook: a financial institution that won't pick one winner.

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