Chain of Thought How Block Deployed AI Agents to 12,000 Employees in 8 Weeks w/ MCP | Angie Jones
How do you deploy AI agents to 12,000 employees in just 8 weeks? How do you do it safely? Angie Jones, VP of Engineering for AI Tools and Enablement at Block, joins the show to share exactly how her team pulled it off.
Block (the company behind Square and Cash App) became an early adopter of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and built Goose, their open-source AI agent that's now a reference implementation for the Agentic AI Foundation. Angie shares the challenges they faced, the security guardrails they built, and why letting employees choose their own models was critical to adoption.
We also dive into vibe coding (including Angie's experience watching Jack Dorsey vibe code a feature in 2 hours), how non-engineers are building their own tools, and what MCP unlocks when you connect multiple systems together.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:02 How Block deployed AI agents to 12,000 employees
05:04 Challenges with MCP adoption and security at scale
07:10 Why Block supports multiple AI models (Claude, GPT, Gemini)
08:40 Open source models and local LLM usage
09:58 Measuring velocity gains across the organization
10:49 Vibe coding: Benefits, risks & Jack Dorsey's 2-hour feature build
13:46 Block's contributions to the MCP protocol
14:38 MCP in action: Incident management + GitHub workflow demo
15:52 Addressing MCP criticism and security concerns
18:41 The Agentic AI Foundation announcement (Block, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft)
21:46 AI democratization: Non-engineers building MCP servers
24:11 How to get started with MCP and prompting tips
25:42 Security guardrails for enterprise AI deployment
29:25 Tool annotations and human-in-the-loop controls
30:22 OAuth and authentication in Goose
32:11 Use cases: Engineering, data analysis, fraud detection
35:22 Goose in Slack: Bug detection and PR creation in 5 minutes
38:05 Goose vs Claude Code: Open source, model-agnostic philosophy
38:17 Live Demo: Council of Minds MCP server (9-persona debate)
45:52 What's next for Goose: IDE support, ACP, and the $100K contributor grant
47:57 Where to get started with Goose
Connect with Angie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angiejones/
Angie's Website: https://angiejones.tech/
Follow Angie on X: https://x.com/techgirl1908
Goose GitHub: https://github.com/block/goose
Connect with Conor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
Follow Conor on X: https://x.com/conorbronsdon
Modular: https://www.modular.com/
Presented By: Galileo AI
Download Galileo's Mastering Multi-Agent Systems for free here: https://galileo.ai/mastering-multi-agent-systems
Topics Covered:
- How Block deployed Goose to all 12,000 employees
- Building enterprise security guardrails for AI agents
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) deep dive
- Vibe coding benefits and risks
- The Agentic AI Foundation (Block, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS)
- MCP sampling and the Council of Minds demo
- OAuth authentication for MCP servers
- Goose vs Claude Code and other AI coding tools
- Non-engineers building AI tools
- Fraud detection with AI agents
- Goose in Slack for real-time bug fixing