Unprompted Intelligence in High-Stakes AI with Hebbia CTO Aabhas Sharma

Episode notes

In this episode of the Shift AI Podcast, Aabhas Sharma, CTO at Hebbia, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a deep conversation on what it actually takes to deploy AI in high-stakes institutional environments - and why the bar is far higher than most tools can meet. Aabhas shares his path from running engineering at Postmates through its Uber acquisition, to a five-year stint as CTO at fintech startup Found, to his current role at Hebbia which began as a year-long advisory engagement before he joined formally. From there, the conversation dives into the core problem Hebbia solves: knowledge workers at the world's top investment banks, asset managers, and private equity firms buried in thousands of documents, needing multi-step analysis that existing tools simply can't handle. The discussion covers how Hebbia thinks about the interplay between deterministic software and large language models using LLMs only where generative reasoning is truly needed and keeping everything else rules-based, auditable, and fast.

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