How a 200-Year-Old Bank Deploys AI Agents

Andy McMahon, Principal AI Engineer at Barclays, shares how a 200-year-old bank is deploying autonomous agents inside one of the most heavily regulated environments in the world. He argues that observability and kill switches matter more than raw capability, and that the real test isn't whether the AI works in a demo, but whether it can fail safely in production.

Key Takeaways

• How a major bank is giving AI agents real autonomy while keeping them bounded inside strict permission structures

• Why "could I build this" is the wrong question for engineers to ask

• Some of the current bottlenecks that slow down agentic payments

• Why most companies are racing to deploy agents without tracking what those agents actually do once they're live

Guest Bio:

Andy McMahon is Principal AI Engineer at Barclays, a guest lecturer at Oxford University, and author of the book "Machine Learning Engineering with Python." He trained as a theoretical physicist, but has spent his career making production AI systems that are safe, governed, and genuinely valuable in some of the most regulated and risk-controlled environments in the world. He has strong opinions about what AI engineering is, where it's going, and what separates the hype from the work that actually matters.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

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Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte