Viktor Gamov, Confluent, on Reliable AI — Interview with Alexy

Viktor Gamov, principal developer advocate at Confluent, the original creators of Apache Kafka, on reliable AI at AI By the Bay 2025. His highlight is the tooling for agents to work with external systems: MCP, agent-to-agent protocols, and everything that lets agentic systems collaborate. Reliable AI is something he can deploy to production, monitor, meter by tokens, and trust not to cascade failures, the same patterns learned from microservices. Like DevOps, reliability is culture, not technology; garbage in, garbage out. In five years the stack is polyglot: Java in production, Python for prototyping, and unified developer experiences over the models.