AI Progress For Brex Starts With Letting Go

“The one mistake we could make is to overthink this,” said Brex CTO James Reggio. “Spend six to nine months evaluating everything very carefully before we deploy it and you don’t know what the world is going to look like nine months from now.”

Brex found it needed to rework how software made its way into the company. The procurement process was too rigid for the pace of AI development, and leadership moved quickly to change it.

As generative AI tools gained traction in 2023, Brex’s standard procurement approach became a bottleneck. Reggio said the company’s piloting and compliance reviews often took longer than teams’ interest in the tools themselves.

“In the first year following ChatGPT, the procurement process itself would actually run so long that the teams that were asking to procure a tool lost interest in the tool by the time we actually got through all of the necessary internal controls,” he said.