AI Summary
5 min readVlad Kylle, co-founder and CEO of Leo, describes a reality that sounds almost absurd: if you send a Fortune 500 enterprise an invoice for $40,000, they will probably just pay it. They don’t have the capacity to negotiate. That gap—the mass of spend that falls below the attention threshold of human procurement teams—is one of the first places Leo’s AI agents create value. But the deeper insight is about what happens when you stop looking at the tidy number in the system of record (the final price, $8K for aluminum) and start looking at everything that produced it: 30 stakeholder meetings, 500 emails, 20 Excel sheets, weeks of 3D modeling by cost engineers. The incumbent software vendors own the record. The AI-native startup owns the work that happens outside it.
The Four Kinds of Agents and Why Incumbents Stall
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction: The End-to-End Opportunity** - The episode frames the core question: if incumbents already own the customer, data, and system of record, where does an AI-native startup have an advantage?
- 2 (02:49) **The New Competitive Dynamic: Incumbent + Model vs. AI-Native** - Seema frames the fight between distribution, innovation, and a new third piece: an incumbent layering a model on top.
- 3 (04:47) **Why Procurement Is Invisible Work** - Vlad explains that the visible record (e.g., an $8K price) hides the massive hidden work: 30 stakeholder meetings, 500 emails, 20 Excel sheets.
- 4 (06:32) **The Four Agent Types: Retrieval, Process, Policy, Principal** - Seema walks through the spectrum of agent capability, from simple retrieval to full judgment.
- 5 (09:16) **Why Incumbents Are Held Back** - Seema explains that incumbents have distribution and trust, but face internal conflicts that prevent them from building more capable agents.
- 6 (10:57) **Where Leo Sits on the Agent Spectrum** - Vlad explains that Leo spans all four categories, depending on complexity and risk, and how they earn trust to move up the spectrum.
- 7 (14:34) **The Two Kinds of Negotiation: Low-Risk vs. High-Risk** - Vlad distinguishes between negotiations enterprises never had capacity for (under $50K) and strategic, multi-million dollar negotiations.
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Show Notes
a16z’s Seema Amble and Elena Burger sit down with Lio co-founder and CEO Vladimir Keil to ask where AI-native startups have an advantage when incumbent software companies already own the customer, the data, and the system of record.
Their answer comes down to the work that happens outside those systems. In procurement, a final price in an ERP can hide hundreds of emails, spreadsheets, supplier conversations, engineering analyses, and decisions across legal, finance, and operations. Vlad explains how Lio uses multi-agent systems to take on more of that end-to-end work, from sourcing and RFQs to negotiation, shipment tracking, and invoices.
They also discuss how enterprises learn to trust agents with increasingly consequential decisions, why the last 20% of an internal AI build can require most of the effort, and what happens when both buyers and suppliers have agents working on their behalf.
Resources:
Follow Vladimir Keil on X: https://x.com/askvladi?lang=en
Follow Vladimir Keil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimir-keil/
Follow Seema Amble on X: https://x.com/seema_amble
Learn more about Lio: https://www.lio.ai/
Seema Amble’s “Investing in Lio” article: https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-lio/
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