Harness aims to come out on top as companies enter the AI gauntlet

Everyone is experimenting on the artificial intelligence playground, but progressing to the next stage of AI products is more complex.

“We’ve always talked about move fast and break things,” said Nick Durkin (pictured), field chief technology officer of Harness Inc. “The problem is in the enterprise, if you move fast and break things, that doesn’t work. You can’t do that at the largest financial institutions. But what you can do is … fail fast in earlier environments.”

Durkin spoke with theCUBE Research analysts John Furrier, Rebecca Knight and Savannah Peterson at Google Cloud Next 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the pace of innovation for AI and how it could impact developers. (* Disclosure below.)

Making great engineers the best with AI

Harness, a software delivery platform that focuses on AI, hopes to increase its partnership with Google Cloud as the AI revolution continues.

“No one wants to babysit deployments, Durkin said. “No one wants to wait for tests to run. No one wants to write policy and do all these tasks. So, let’s let AI do the things that we hate doing.”

AI’s ability to automate tedious tasks could have a big impact on developers, who would have more time for creative engineering when the base code has been taken care of, according to Durkin.

“We’re taking good engineers and making them great. We’re making great engineers the best,” he said.

Guardrails are crucial for AI development, Durkin emphasized, highlighting the importance of debugging at earlier stages.

“If we don’t put it in a guarded path, we actually can’t trust it,” he said. “If we look at anything that we generate with AI, we have to take it with a zero-trust methodology. If we’re not doing all of that through the delivery, we genuinely don’t achieve anything.”

Despite his words of caution, Durkin believes that innovation is essential for companies that hope to stay afloat on the AI wave.

“If you’re not innovating, you’re dying,” he said. “Everybody throws their name in the hat, and you have to sift through the ones that are actually doing it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024: