The Skill, Not the Stack: A Decade Ahead on Decision Intelligence. Featuring Fred Laluyaux, Aera Technology Founder & CEO

Talk about what the technology can do, not how it does it. That's the decision Fred Laluyaux made with Shariq Mansoor when they founded Aera ten years ago, and it's still how the company talks about its decision intelligence platform today.

Decisions sit at the center of what Aera builds. Aera automates, augments, and digitizes the thousands of decisions companies make every day to run their business.

Aera pioneered the decision intelligence category years before generative AI gave the industry a vocabulary for it: agents, skills, memory, decision traces, context – graphs even. From the start, Aera was conceived as an agent, in the spirit of the digital assistants of that era. Laluyaux championed the word "skills" years before the major AI players made it common currency. He co-founded Aera in 2016, before GenAI and large language models, and has served as CEO since.

In this conversation, Laluyaux traces the arc from DJing in Paris to building SAP's finance line of business to Aera's decade-long bet that decisions -- not dashboards -- are the unit that matters. And why, he argues, letting AI take on more of the decision doesn't have to mean losing control.

Laluyaux's analogy: he trusts a Waymo with his kids more than an Uber driver because he can see exactly how each choice is made. That is what decision intelligence is really about.

This episode is brought to you by Aera Technology: https://www.aeratechnology.com