In this episode, Sagnik Nandy (CTO & EVP of Engineering @ Docusign) joins Jerry to discuss keys to success when it comes to peer-led AI transformation. Sagnik shares how they approached AI adoption internally @ Docusign with the use of both champions & multipliers, understanding trade offs associated with AI adoption, determining which tasks to assign to agents, frameworks for measuring the ROI of agentic tools, and how it helps bring value to your customers. He also discusses how to measure the customer productivity index (CPI) and what it takes to mitigate customer issues when scaling AI internally. 

ABOUT SAGNIK NANDY

Sagnik Nandy is the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Docusign responsible for engineering, cloud operations, and technology strategy that enables customers globally to run their organizations on Docusign.

Most recently, Sagnik served as the President and Chief Development Officer for Workforce Identity at Okta where led engineering development and operations, product management, and design and user research. Earlier, he joined Okta as their CTO, overseeing the engineering and business technology arms of the company.

Prior to Okta, Sagnik served as the Vice President of Engineering at Google where he oversaw several critical components of Google’s core advertising business, the backbone of the company’s growth and revenue. During his 15 years at Google, Sagnik also helped build Google’s Measurement and Analytics offerings and took several products from inception to becoming market leaders.

Sagnik has a bachelor’s degree from the BITS, Pilani (Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani) and a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from UC San Diego.

The CAFE(S) framework is a research-backed definition of context quality for AI agents.

DX collaborated with researchers at Capital One, Google, and UVic to give teams a shared standard for reviewing agent context by breaking it into five properties: clarity, actionability, fidelity, efficiency, and security.

Your agent is only as good as its context and the CAFE(S) framework establishes a shared language around context to help you better understand how & why agents go wrong.

Check it out here!

SHOW NOTES:

• Introducing Sagnik & his role @ Docusign (1:28)
• Strategies for approaching AI transformation internally (2:52)
• How to create early goals & iterate quickly (4:50)
• Using DocuWiki as a source of truth for agents (9:10)
• How multipliers can address architecture-related decision making (11:12)
• Understanding the role of multipliers & organizational accountability (12:43)
• Trade offs eng leaders have to make when scaling AI adoption (14:05)
• Illustrating the standard AI workflow / where human decision making steps in (16:22)
• Frameworks for measuring the customer value of agents (20:13)
• Steps for mitigating risks of customer-facing issues when scaling AI internally (26:13)
• Tackling cost considerations when it comes to AI adoption (30:35)
• Best practices for maintaining your AI usage / methodology across a large org (35:06)
• How to AI effectively as a CTO (37:25)
• Rapid fire questions (38:39)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/