Columbia DAP Lab × Purple Fabric · 2025
What it takes to make AI agents enterprise-ready
Eugene Wu, Columbia University DAP Lab, in conversation with Aditya Rajashekaran
Eugene Wu is Associate Professor at Columbia University and Co-Director of the DAP Lab. In this session, he and Aditya Rajashekaran, AVP Product at Purple Fabric, work through the realities of deploying AI agents in production: where the biggest risks emerge, why building an agent is often easier than validating it, and what enterprises actually need before they can trust AI in regulated, high-stakes environments.
The discussion covers:
- the difference between agent development and traditional software development
- benchmarking, evaluation, and the challenge of proving reliability
- human-in-the-loop review, accountability, and trust
- data lineage, citations, traceability, and auditability
- why "gold standard" data can still be flawed
- the infrastructure and controls needed for scalable agentic systems
The examples run across insurance, wealth management, and ESG workflows, past the hype and into the operational, governance, and systems design questions that determine whether enterprise AI actually works.