Show Notes
Shensi Ding (Co-Founder & CEO of Merge) started building integrations six years ago, before AI was the market. Now OpenAI, Perplexity, and Factory run on Merge’s connectivity layer. In this episode of Navigators, Paul sits down with her to talk about what it actually takes to connect agents to the systems they need.
When Merge benchmarked its tools against public MCP servers, it found a 99.999% success rate compared with roughly 60% for public servers. Shensi says most of those public servers are side projects and marketing that nobody maintains. That is also why AI security hasn’t had its big incident yet: the tools fail before any PII can leave. She explains why that is about to change, why it’s irresponsible to run AI without a DLP layer, and why you can’t vibe code critical infrastructure.
Chapters: 0:00 Intro 1:19 What Merge builds: the connectivity layer for AI 4:02 The agentic-tooling gap MCP opened 5:14 Why thousands of tools is a security risk 6:13 "They only see what's on the menu" 6:55 Why it's irresponsible to run AI without a DLP layer 7:39 Merge for Workforce: governance for IT 12:40 99.999% vs 60%: benchmarking tool reliability 12:59 Is MCP the right protocol? 18:30 Why the founder sets the AI ceiling 21:05 996, barrels and ammo, and hiring for AI 37:57 Why humans become the blocker to the singularity
Browserbase gives AI agents a browser to operate in. Navigators is our series of conversations with the people building the agentic future.
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