Andrew Odewahn, CTO of O'Reilly Media, described a research agent his team built to answer organizational questions. He spoke on Live with Tim O'Reilly on October 15, 2026, in an interview with Tim O'Reilly. The source describes the event summary as created by Claude with light editing by Tim O'Reilly, based on a transcript.
The agent connects an AI model to an organization's own systems. Andrew mapped the company's information sources as a hierarchy. Strategic goals and feature priorities live in Productboard. They become epics, sprints, and stories in Jira. Stories become code in GitHub. A service catalog lists the roughly 300 services that make up the O'Reilly platform and their owners. Observability tools show how those services perform against their SLOs. He connected these systems through MCP, and he wrote a skill file that tells the agent how to use them. He also told the agent it was a research agent, not a coding agent, and that its job was to write reports. Connecting the tools was, in his words, "the most completely tedious step of the whole process." Productboard had no MCP server at the time, so he wrote a wrapper.
Andrew tested the system on a hiring request from an engineering manager. The first report covered a five-person