Getting Smarter, Not Just Faster
O'Reilly, Friday, October 30th, 2026
O'Reilly CTO Andrew Odewahn describes a research agent linked to company systems via MCP to help the organization get smarter, not just faster.
This summary of an Oct 15, 2026 Live with Tim O'Reilly episode, written by Claude with light editing, features CTO Andrew Odewahn describing O'Reilly's Expert Intelligence tools and a research agent that answers project-status questions.
He built it by mapping the organization's sources of truth as a hierarchy, from Productboard to Jira, GitHub, a service catalog of about 300 services and observability tools, then connecting them via MCP and writing a skill covering local quirks.
Connecting everything was the most tedious step, and he wrote a wrapper for Productboard.
The conversation frames the goal as the organization getting smarter, not only faster, and covers a review system for the agent's output.