The City Center for Agentic Engineering

Hey everyone, it's Alan. " My next guest, he's the first time on here, but I've been familiar with the company a while. I'm glad to God that he's finally joining us.

His name is Zohar Einy. io. You may have heard of them.

If you haven't, don't worry, we're going to tell you all about them. But let's welcome Zohar. " Thank you so much for having me.

I'm very excited about it. My pleasure. So Zohar, before we get into Port and everything else we want to talk about, let's start off with you.

You're CEO here at Port. Give us the story leading up to that. I'm sure there's a good story there.

Yeah. So I started as a developer and a researcher, and I felt like the lives of developers are, in many ways, corrupted because you have to know so many tools and so many moving pieces, and you barely have time to really write the code, back then, before AI. Mm-hmm.

So the reason why we wanted to start Port is to really fix the lives of developers that have to navigate through a bunch of tickets, and understanding Terraform and CI/CD, and vulnerabilities and incidents. And we wanted to simplify their lives by bringing everything under one umbrella. And we started Port by solving developers' lives, giving them one unified developer experience, a product they can actually use and be self-sufficient and not relying on other teams.

And this is what got us into starting Port at the beginning. And we are very passionate about everything that has to be with engineering teams, their lives, what's on their mind, what's bothering them, what's slowing them down, and how to improve their lives in general. This is why we wake up in the morning.

Absolutely. And it's a good cause, right? I remember seeing research.

This is also, again, before AI. We make it like it was so long ago, but it's like last year or the year before. Research, look, the average developer spent only somewhere between 10% and 30% of his time actually coding.

The majority of his time was spent on the things you were talking about. Right? And coders want to code.

But AI has changed it, right? And we're foolish if we don't acknowledge that. It's obvious.

It's the elephant in the room. Coders don't necessarily code today anymore, right? They manage the coding.

They oversee it. They tell it what to code. But the vibe coding, whatever you want to call it, using AI to generate code, the last research I saw, something like 90% of coders, of developers, software engineers are what we're calling them now, right- Yeah ...

are using AI. Yeah. And I spoke with my wife a few weeks ago, and my wife, she's an R&D team leader at a different startup company.

And she told me, "Today, I merged the PR, and I have to be candid, I didn't read through the code. " And I said, wow, for me, it was a big statement to say, "I merged a PR. I trust the AI reviewer.

I trust the AI coding. " It's happening. It's crazy.

If I would've told you three years ago that's where we'd be, probably you wouldn't believe me. Because why would anyone just trust it? But that's how quickly our brains, not just our brains, but the whole industry is sort of wrapping around that this is the new reality, this is the new now.

Right? Right. I'll be honest, same thing.

Not necessarily with computer code, but helping me write, helping not just me, but we publish about 500 articles a month across all of our sites. It's a lot of writing. First, we didn't allow any AI.

Then we said, "Okay, but it's got to be human in the loop," and all of that good stuff. It's still human in the loop, but it's gotten so much better. Right.

Why wouldn't we? How has that affected Port? Let's talk about how that's changed the mission for Port.

So everyone are using AI, but I think that we are still not even touching, it's not even the tip of the iceberg because all the industry is using AI as a coding assistance. AI is assisting you as a developer to do things. It's helping you do things manually, just faster.

9% of the companies are still not agentic engineering native. And what do I mean by agentic engineering? It means that humans are leading, and AI is operating, and AI is not just a coding assistant, it's actually taking end-to-end tasks for you.

Like you have a new ticket that is created, and it finds its way all the way to production in even minutes. Or incidents are self-healing themselves. So vulnerability, automatically cleaning themselves.

And I think that while everything is very exciting with AI, we are still far from this vision. That we are not there yet. And what we found out is At Port, working with customers like, GitHub is one of our biggest customers, and PwC and others, is that if you want to move from a cool demo of something that is remedying an incident or fixing a vulnerability, when you want to do it at scale, this is a different game.

It's not as cool as the demo, right? You have to take care of all those technical debt aspects that we all know, like quality and security and governance and change management. Those are the things that I believe the industry right now will focus on to be able to take AI all the way for real, not just as a coding assistant, but as an AI-led organization.

Agreed. And I think sometimes we forget that because what AI has already brought to the table, even if AI stopped maturing, stopped evolving, what we have the capability to do right now, we still haven't fully digested, we still haven't fully synthesized. You know what I mean?

Right. We still have work to do there. The challenge or the fun of it is while we're trying to do that, they keep moving the goalposts.

The AI keeps getting better and being able to do more. So before we could even figure out or get our arms around what it does now, we've got to figure out what it's doing tomorrow. And that, for me personally, as a tech geeky kind of person, I love that, right?

Every day, I can't wait to see what's next. Yeah. But you've got companies who need to build businesses with this too, which brings me to something you guys just launched on July 14th, the Port AI Builder, right?

Right. Help companies get their heads around this, arms around it. Talk to us about that.

Yeah. The reason why I believe I'll anchor back to the problem of how do we get to a state where we are a fully agentic engineering organization. What we are seeing right now is that developers are not waiting, right?

They have AI in their hands. They start to build their agents. They want to create their little crew of an AI SRE agent or a security agent or a coder agent that takes things all the way.

So companies got into a situation where you have agent sprawl. This is how we call it. Many different agents are connected to a bunch of MCPs, and many different skills are scattered around organizations and MCPs.

And the CIO says, "Guys, stop. " And we realized that the only way to let developers build and stay under control is to give them a unified infrastructure that they can use to build any agentic workflow that they want. So what developers need to build agents, they need data.

So this is something that they consume through a context lake. They need a workflow engine. They need a skill registry.

They need an agent registry. They need guardrails. So this is the infrastructure that we give developers in order to build any agentic workflow that they want.

So it's a win-win for the CIO and the platform team. They get the control, and developers get their playground, but with the guardrails of the organization. But the reason why we decided that we want to democratize our infrastructure for developers with building with AI, and the reason why we invested in this building with AI capability, is because we cannot expect developers to learn all the infrastructure pieces that Port provides.

We realized that we need to give them a way to build in natural language and orchestrate the building process for them on top of the infrastructure. Let's take another example. Developers don't know much about AWS, right?

You need to abstract away AWS for developers, and this is what platform engineering did in the past. And now we need to abstract away the ability for developers to build their agents on top of a unified infrastructure that brings control to the organization. So the bottom line is the building with AI capability lets developers build in natural language, any agent across the SDLC, and the platform team gains control over the governance, the audit, control of the data, the access, and being able to measure the ROI in a unified place.

So it's a win-win for both the developers and the platform teams that want velocity and control on the other end. I love it. I have to, excuse me, but we got to do some of the nuts and bolts here.

For people out here who say, "This sounds good. I want to check it out. " Zohar, help people.

How do they get to do this? So first of all, we believe that people should try out for their own. We have the ability to sign up for the product, play with it.

We have tokens built inside for free that you can use and get the gist of the product, with a very permissive free tier, so you can go wild, you can invite users, and build your first agentic workflows with Port. io website, sign up, and we also have a Slack community, so if you want to chat with anyone from our team or you want to chat with me, we are all there, we are all helping, and we have a community of people that are helping each other. So we would love to chat and see how we can help you build your agentic workflow.

io, right? Yeah. And you can get started from there.

And from there, you can hit the Slack, blogs, the product, everything, yeah? Correct. Everything you can do by yourself.

Great. So I mentioned before we started recording, I had seen Port at the New York in-person day for Platform Con. The platform engineering show.

Right. It's interesting because Port is a company that appeals to developers, platform engineers, DevOps engineers, probably the whole spectrum, SREs, all of them. When someone asks you to describe Port, do you tell them, "We're a platform engineering solution," or, "We're a platform," or, "We're a developer"?

I realize your heart is with developers, but how would you describe Port to people? Port is the place where humans and agents work side by side to deliver software at the speed of light. It's a city center for every technical team, not just for the developers, because you have many different technical teams that are shipping software.

Developers are responsible for the coding, but you have security teams, you have DevOps, you have SREs, you have QA, you have product managers, you have developers. All of them together eventually ship software, and if you address just the developers, you are not really moving the needle. You have to address all technical teams and letting them work with AI effectively across the SDLC.

I love it. One last question. Back to the Port AI Builder.

Free trial and free for kind of smaller uses. But how is it priced for an enterprise kind of situation? How do you price this?

Yeah. We have an element both of seats that you are buying and also usage- Okay ... element of the amount of data and automations.

Got it. But the idea and the philosophy of the pricing is when you get the value, then you grow with Port, and this is the way it's structured to have a win-win. The more value you get, the bigger you grow with us.

I love it. Zohar, I want to thank you for coming here on Techstrong TV. Don't be a stranger.

We do this every day. So if you want to talk about this, just reach out. Happy to have you on, and we can continue the conversation.

io is the place to go to for all to start your journey on everything we've spoken about here. Go check it out. Congratulations on the release of Port AI Builder.

We're looking forward to seeing how the market reacts to this, and I'm sure it's going to help a lot of people. Thank you so much. We are excited about it.

All righty. io, here on Techstrong TV. Hey, we're going to take a break.

We got more Techstrong TV coming up. Stay tuned.