The Perception Layer for AI Agents
Techstrong TV Interviews
•
13m
Documents sit behind almost every business process, and most enterprises are about to learn the hard way that AI agents cannot reason about what they cannot read. Slavena Hristova, Director of Product Marketing for Document AI at ABBYY, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to explain how 35+ years of OCR and intelligent capture have positioned ABBYY as the “perception layer” for the agentic era. With 22 years inside ABBYY herself, Slavena walks Alan through the journey from scanning paper to reading meaning, why RPA bots taught the industry that documents break automation, and how AI agents amplify that risk at enterprise scale. She also lays out the LLM cost trap — “token maxing” on workloads that should never have hit a frontier model — and how guardrails and orchestration are reshaping how CIOs buy AI today.
Up Next in Techstrong TV Interviews
-
Flow Is Necessary, But Not Sufficient
Work has to move — but it also has to matter. Phil Clark, the former VP Engineering at Parchment (acquired by Instructure for $835M in 2024) and founder of RYU Advisory & Media, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to preview his Flowtopia 2026 talk: "Flow is necessary but not sufficient. Why leade...
-
Open Source Is the Inevitable End Sta...
Open source is no longer just a software movement — it is the foundation the entire AI stack is built on, from CUDA to Kubernetes to the models themselves. Duane O'Brien, the new Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to talk about the organizat...
-
Why More Control Means More Chaos
Since the Industrial Revolution, leaders have believed that more control equals better outcomes. That belief is now actively working against them. Erica Engelen, founder of The Flow Hive and a Team Topologies Valued Practitioner, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV from Belgium to preview her Flow...