# Durable Execution and the Infrastructure Powering AI Agents

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-a16z-6874937/durable-execution-and-the-infrastructure-powering-ai-agents
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-a16z-6874937/durable-execution-and-the-infrastructure-powering-ai-agents.md
Podcast: [AI + a16z](https://stenobird.com/podcast/ai-a16z-6874937)
Published: 2026-02-19T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://ai-a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/durable-execution-and-the-infrastructure-powering-ai-agents-edrnjoca-sPuB7Zdw
Audio file: https://mgln.ai/e/1344/afp-848985-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/112866f3-1a50-4a8d-b12e-850b73e71b33/episodes/246f01f7-e84a-4731-bdcb-f716706157fd/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=112866f3-1a50-4a8d-b12e-850b73e71b33&awEpisodeId=246f01f7-e84a-4731-bdcb-f716706157fd&feed=Hb_IuXOo
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/ai-a16z-6874937/episodes/durable-execution-and-the-infrastructure-powering-ai-agents
Duration seconds: 3826

## Resource

Raghu Raghuram, Managing Partner at a16z, and Sarah Wang, General Partner at a16z, speak with Samar Abbas, CEO of Temporal, about how durable execution became the infrastructure layer behind some of the world’s most widely used AI agents. They cover why long-running agents require state management and recoverability, how Temporal powers OpenAI’s Codex and Snap’s Story processing, and why the shift from interactive to background agents is creating distributed systems challenges at a scale that didn’t exist two years ago.

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## Transcript

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