Your platform is your business, encoded onto your infra, with Syntasso's Abby Bangser

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Abby Bangser, a platform engineering leader at Syntasso and former lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to talk about why AI agents need real platform APIs, not raw cloud credentials.

Abby and Ganesh dig into what business requirements actually look like when encoded into a platform, from compliance and labeling to disaster recovery and regional decisions. They talk through why markdown "skill" documents are no substitute for real APIs and deterministic tools that enforce constraints by design. Abby introduces the Etsy analogy: platform teams are like the engineering org at Etsy, responsible for building the marketplace itself rather than knitting the sweaters. And she makes the case against distributing IaC templates to end users, arguing that an API layer separating producers from consumers is what lets a platform evolve without breaking everything downstream.

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00:00 Why AI agents need a platform, not raw AWS credentials.

06:42 What business requirements actually look like encoded into infrastructure.

13:28 Why AI should write your tools rather than run your infrastructure.

18:03 The Etsy analogy: build the marketplace, not the products.

23:03 How enabling internal producers turns a platform into an ecosystem.

26:53 Why IaC templates fall short and what an API layer solves.