AI & LLMs
Large language models, assistants, prompting, agents and applications - including plain-language explanation for non-technical readers.
WholeAustin · Austin metro · AI
The complete Austin guide to ai — the local businesses and the firms that shape the market, each read for how findable it is online, alongside the concepts, the news and the questions that define the field. Own one? See where you stand and exactly what to improve.
The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in ai — context, not local listings; never scored.
Large language models, assistants, prompting, agents and applications - including plain-language explanation for non-technical readers.
Systems that take actions rather than answer questions - the current centre of gravity, and now the main feature race inside enterprise software.
Running capable models without a hyperscaler - self-hosting, open weights, on-prem and VPC inference for regulated buyers.
Frameworks, dev tooling, open source, CI/CD, coding workflows and the agentic coding assistants reshaping them.
Compute, data centers, APIs, platforms, Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code - plus what cloud spend actually costs.
Threats, breaches, privacy and defense - endpoint, cloud, identity and software supply chain.
Humanoids and mobile robots, industrial and warehouse automation, drones - and the machines a buyer can actually purchase today.
New companies, rounds and the business of tech, with Austin as a first-class market: Dell, Oracle, IBM, Indeed, CrowdStrike, Tesla, AMD, NXP, Silicon Labs, Q2 and SailPoint.
The constraint layer that increasingly decides what ships - AI rules, provenance, data residency and sector regulation.
ARR, MRR, net and gross retention, churn, CAC, LTV, payback, magic number and the rule of 40 - how software businesses are judged.
Seat-based versus usage-based and hybrid pricing, freemium tiers, land-and-expand motions, and what AI features do to a per-seat model.
Product-led self-serve adoption against enterprise field sales - and the hybrid motion most B2B software now runs.
MQL to SQL, pipeline coverage, POCs and pilots, RFPs, security reviews, MSAs, DPAs and SLAs - the real path from interest to signature.
SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA and GDPR - the audit evidence that decides whether a deal can even start.
SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, RBAC and least privilege - the enterprise checklist that gates every seat.
Uptime commitments and nines, SRE practice, error budgets, monitoring and tracing, on-call, incidents and blameless postmortems.
define subscription software the vendor hosts and operates; contrast with licensed software the buyer installs and patches
explain it is an attestation that controls the vendor described were operating, not a security guarantee or a certification; say what the trust services criteria cover
Type 1 is design at a point in time, Type 2 is operating effectiveness over an observation window; note the window length varies and should be read off the report
ISO 27001 certifies a management system against a standard, SOC 2 attests to controls for a report reader; explain which one European and which one US buyers usually ask for
define billing tied to consumption units rather than headcount, and name the common units without quoting anyone's rates
agents plan, call tools and take multi-step actions; chatbots answer; say plainly which one the product in question actually is
identity replaced the network boundary; reference NIST SP 800-207 rather than a vendor's definition
a machine-readable inventory of components; explain the supply-chain incidents that made it a contract term
explain SAML/OIDC and the SSO tax debate honestly; do not claim a particular vendor's tier pricing
frame it as deferred work that raises the cost of every future change; give the symptoms a buyer can observe from outside
shared infrastructure with logical isolation versus a dedicated instance; explain the cost and control tradeoff without implying one is inherently insecure
do the arithmetic plainly, then explain that the definition of downtime in the SLA matters more than the number of nines
explain the authorization process and who it applies to; whether the buyer needs it depends on their agency customers, so ask rather than assert
monitoring answers known questions, observability lets you ask new ones; name logs, metrics and traces
give the decision framework - is it core to the product, do you have the team to run it for five years, what is the true carrying cost - but the answer depends on the buyer's roadmap and headcount
differentiating versus table-stakes; build what customers pay you for, buy the rest
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