Building AI for the Real Economy
'Gradient Descending' is a series of roundtables on AI: curated deep dives with technical builders. Past roundtables discussions covered RL Environments, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Agent Frameworks, Open Source Models, and Knowledge Graphs with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Scale AI and many more.
For this session, we’re joined by Gabriel Guinea Montalvo, co-founder & CEO of Pillar, to discuss what it takes to build and sell AI into the real economy.
Pillar recently raised a €12m seed round led by Earlybird and Base10 and is building an AI operating system for construction, one of the world’s largest and least digitised industries.
We’ll talk about what it takes to move beyond AI demos and build products that win trust, drive adoption, and become embedded in the daily operations of legacy SME markets.
We’ll explore:
building AI for traditional industries
balancing bespoke work with scale
earning trust with non-AI-native customers
Expect an honest discussion with a curated group of founders and operators building in AI.
Agenda:
Arrivals: 17:30–18:00
Roundtable discussion: 18:00–19:00
Drinks: 19:00–20:00
See past roundtables here:
https://www.akashbajwa.co/t/ai-roundtables
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