Claude Connects Chiang Mai · CMU STeP · July 11, 2026
Claude-Native
How we run real businesses on the Claude stack
Nick Frith, Section 9
Ian Borders, Kybernesis
ROADMAP · 13:00–15:00
The next two hours
Everything you’ll see is the real system we run our companies on — and how you can too.
INTRO · 10 MIN · NICK + IAN
Who We Are
Two operators running real businesses Claude-native.

NICK · SECTION 9

IAN · KYBERNESIS
Intro · Nick
Nick Frith
Forward-deployed AI automations. we find the bottleneck, automate it, and hand you the keys.
- One human + a fleet of Claude agents runs the whole company — sales, delivery, content, operations
- Everything you’ll see today is the real system I work in every day — not a demo built for this talk
SECTION9.DEV
Intro · Nick
Living on the Frontier
The Chiang Mai AI community.
- Runs every Saturday
- Almost three years running
- Bleeding edge — we stay on top of what’s happening in AI, every week, hands-on



Intro · Ian
Ian Borders
Persistent memory and multi-agent orchestration for Claude. We give your agents a brain that remembers and a team that runs itself.
- Claude Community Ambassador for Thailand — I run the official Claude Code meetups all over Thailand
- Kybernesis is the platform under the hood: Arcana memory, sleep-time compute, agent orchestration — the same stack we deploy through the Claude Partner Network, and the one I run my own company on every day
- Forward-deployed AI engineering services — I embed with your business and build this stack into your workflows directly

PART I OF IV · 15 MIN · CASE STUDIES
How Companies Use Claude
Real companies, real problems, real outcomes — from the Claude partner network.
Case studies · the frame
Real companies, real numbers
The same three doors: the Claude app · Claude Code · the API.
- Every story: a problem you’ll recognize → Claude → a number you can feel
- Businesses like yours are in here — chat-app sellers, local shops, lean teams
- Wherever you hear “WhatsApp,” read LINE


Case studies · Grab · the problem
The big chains have data teams. The noodle shop doesn’t.
- Millions of small merchants across Southeast Asia sell on Grab
- The chains run analytics teams; the small shop runs on gut feel
- Merchants had no access to the insights their bigger competitors take for granted
Case studies · Grab · the solution
AI insights for every merchant, inside Grab
- Grab built merchant recommendations and insights on Claude — the API door
- Every merchant gets the analysis that used to require a data team
- Nothing new to learn — it lives inside the Grab platform they already use

Case studies · Grab · the outcome
Leveling the playing field
- AI-powered recommendations for merchants across Southeast Asia
- Levels the competitive playing field between large and small businesses
- ”Anthropic works alongside our teams to solve business challenges” — Chris Collard, Product Manager, Grab
Case studies · Vambe · the problem
Selling in the chat app, losing the thread
- Businesses across Latin America sell in WhatsApp & Instagram — in Thailand, read this as LINE
- Their old AI lost context mid-conversation and stumbled on regional language
- It couldn’t act — no payments, no CRM updates — so a human had to finish every sale
Case studies · Vambe · the solution
An AI closer that remembers — and acts
- Built on the Claude API: qualifies leads, answers questions, completes the sale inside the chat
- Remembers the whole thread — the price quoted three days ago, the objection raised
- Wired into the business: CRM, bookings, payment processing

Case studies · Vambe · the outcome
The outcome
1,500+ businesses run on it. “Claude could pick up a conversation from three days ago and remember what was discussed… This meant fewer lost deals.” — Diego Chahuán, co-founder
higher conversion — with 95%+ multi-agent reliability, up from 30%
Case studies · Local Falcon · the problem
Your Google ranking is your storefront
- Cafés, guesthouses, tours — local businesses live and die on Google rankings
- The answers are buried in thousands of customer reviews and competitor data
- No owner has time to read a million reviews


Case studies · Local Falcon · the solution
Claude reads every review, so you don’t
- Local Falcon feeds reviews and local-search data to Claude — up to 1 million reviews at once
- Out comes plain language: what customers actually complain about, and what to fix
- Serving 95,000 local businesses


Case studies · Local Falcon · the outcome
The outcome
And it paid the company back too — Local Falcon’s own recurring revenue grew 15% after shipping the Claude features. The rankings the cafés and tours in this room live on.
saved per business, per month, on review analysis
Case studies · Lyft · the problem
30–40 minutes on hold
- Riders and drivers waited 30–40 minutes to reach a support agent
- Agents juggled three or four customers at once — burnout was setting in
- Every service business in this room knows this queue
Case studies · Lyft · the solution
AI answers first, humans get the context
- Claude powers the support assistant across rider and driver support
- When a human takes over, they get an AI summary of the whole conversation
- Nobody says “please repeat your issue” anymore

Case studies · Lyft · the outcome
The outcome
Plus 30% better decision accuracy — and millions saved, reinvested into the human, high-touch programs.
faster customer-support resolution time
Case studies · L’Oréal · the problem
A million customer conversations, one regulated industry
- Customers talk about your brand at a scale no team can read
- Beauty is tightly regulated — the analysis has to be right
- Traditional analytics couldn’t capture the nuance
Case studies · L’Oréal · the solution
Fifteen specialized Claude agents
- Conversational analytics built on 15+ specialized Claude agents
- Each agent owns one analysis task — together they read everything
- An agent team, shaped like the work

Case studies · L’Oréal · the outcome
The outcome
99.9% accuracy in conversational analytics — in an industry where being wrong isn’t an option.
monthly active users across the organization
Case studies · Canva · the problem
5,000 employees, one question: how do we all use AI?
- Canva wanted every team empowered with AI — with room to experiment
- Not a pilot in one corner of the company. Everyone.
Case studies · Canva · the solution
Claude for Work, rolled out to everyone
- Claude became the go-to tool — employees were “begging for Claude accounts”
- No code, no engineers required — the same door is open to any company in this room

Case studies · Canva · the outcome
The outcome
The tool half this room already uses for its posters — run on Claude inside. The easiest story here to copy.
of team members use AI “every day” or “often” to work faster and better
Case studies · Quantium · the problem
”ALL IN on AI” — under strict security standards
- Diverse teams working complex client problems, with strict security and ethics requirements
- The goal: AI embedded in every role and workflow — not a side tool for one team
Case studies · Quantium · the solution
Claude for Enterprise, every team
- Company-wide rollout — no API, no engineers, no custom code
- The proposal machine: complex client proposals drafted with Claude
- This is the one you can replicate Monday morning

Case studies · Quantium · the outcome
The outcome
Up to 90% time reduction on proposals; leadership-program development cut in half, from 64 days to 32.
of staff use AI daily — client proposals went from weeks to hours
Case studies · Gumroad · the problem
Non-technical people, waiting on engineers
- A small remote team; every product change bottlenecked on engineering
- The people who talk to customers couldn’t fix what customers complained about
Case studies · Gumroad · the solution
Support became the product team
- With Claude, the support team doesn’t just answer queries — they fix issues and ship features
- Describe the fix in plain language, review the result
- The people closest to the customer now hold the tools

Case studies · Gumroad · the outcome
The outcome
The whole 30-plus-person team adopted it within a couple of months. That’s the permission slip.
new features shipped to production — 4x faster deployment
Case studies · Spotify · the problem
Thousands of repositories, endless migrations
- A massive codebase needing constant maintenance across thousands of repositories
- The big semantic migrations stayed manual, labor-intensive work
Case studies · Spotify · the solution
A background agent: from prompt to merged PR
- Claude Code runs inside Spotify’s fleet management as an autonomous background agent
- Engineers describe the change in plain text — in Slack — and review the finished pull request
- The same Claude Code you’ll see in Part III

Case studies · Spotify · the outcome
The outcome
Up to 90% time savings on migrations. 60%+ of engineers use it — with 90%+ satisfaction scores.
agent-generated pull requests merged into production
Case studies · Rakuten · the problem
Thousands of developers, 70+ businesses
- One of Asia’s biggest internet groups — thousands of developers across 70+ businesses
- Development bottlenecks were slowing feature delivery across the group
Case studies · Rakuten · the solution
Claude Code, running in parallel
- Claude Code across engineering — multiple autonomous sessions at once
- ”I didn’t write any code during those seven hours. I just provided occasional guidance.” — Kenta Naruse, ML engineer

Case studies · Rakuten · the outcome
The outcome
Seven hours of sustained autonomous coding, with 99.9% accuracy on complex code changes.
faster time-to-market — 24 days down to 5
Case studies · Adalat AI · the problem
50 million pending court cases
- India: 50M+ pending cases, average resolution time over 12 years
- Court portals hard to navigate, riddled with CAPTCHAs, almost entirely in English
- Most families have no idea what’s happening in their own cases


Case studies · Adalat AI · the solution
A nation’s courts, on WhatsApp
- India’s first AI-powered national case-information helpline — on WhatsApp, powered by Claude
- Court orders summarized and translated into Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam
- Built by a tiny nonprofit — Claude API integrated in 2 days, working prototype in 1 week


Case studies · Adalat AI · the outcome
The outcome
A single engineer ships production products in 30 days with Claude Code. The same three doors — at national scale.
people within reach of multilingual legal information about their own cases
Case studies · recap
Which one is your bottleneck?
- Selling in chat — Vambe · Reviews and rankings — Local Falcon
- Support queues — Lyft · Knowing your customers — L'Oréal
- A whole company on AI, no code — Canva & Quantium
- Shipping without engineers — Gumroad · Developer velocity — Spotify & Rakuten
- Hold that answer — the rest of the session shows you the tools they used
OVER TO IAN · MANAGED AGENTS · 15 MIN
Claude Managed Agents
Production-grade autonomous agents, without building the infrastructure.
Managed Agents · the problem
Building an agent is easy. Running one in production is not.
The model is the small part. Everything around it — the part that makes an agent safe, reliable, and deployable — is months of undifferentiated infrastructure work.
01
Secure sandboxing
Isolated compute to run code and shell commands without exposing your systems.
02
State & sessions
Persisting conversation history and filesystem state across long-running tasks.
03
Permissioning
Credential management, scoped access, and tracing for every tool call.
04
Agent-loop rework
Re-tuning orchestration, context, and error recovery for every model upgrade.
Managed Agents absorbs all four — your team builds the product, not the plumbing.
Managed Agents · what it is
A configurable agent harness on managed infrastructure
The Messages API gives you direct model access to build your own loop. Managed Agents gives you the whole loop — orchestration, tools, and execution — built on four primitives.
Agent
The reusable definition: model, system prompt, tools, MCP servers, skills. Created once, referenced by ID.
agents.create()
Environment
Where sessions run — an Anthropic-managed cloud sandbox or your self-hosted infrastructure.
environments.create()
Session
A running instance performing a task, with its own isolated sandbox and persistent state.
sessions.create()
Events
The message stream between your app and the agent — user turns, tool results, status updates over SSE.
sessions.events
Managed Agents · how it works
Five calls to autonomous work
- Create an agent — define the model, prompt, and toolset once
- Create an environment — a cloud or self-hosted sandbox
- Start a session — launch an instance referencing both
- Send & stream — Claude runs tools, results stream back over SSE
- Steer or interrupt — send new events mid-run to redirect
Claude works until the task is done, then emits session.status_idle — no polling loop for you to write.
# define once, run anywhere agent = client.beta.agents.create( model=”claude-opus-4-8”, tools=[{"type": "agent_toolset_20260401"}]) session = client.beta.sessions.create( agent=agent.id, environment_id=env.id) with client.beta.sessions.events.stream(session.id) as s: # Claude works autonomously →
Managed Agents · the architecture
Decoupling the brain from the hands
Claude’s reasoning, the execution environment, and persistent state are separated — each scales independently, and a failure in one no longer takes down the others.
THE BRAIN
Stateless harness
The agent loop lives outside the container and calls it as a generic tool — inference starts the moment events arrive.
THE HANDS
Disposable sandbox
Each session gets a fresh, isolated Linux container. A container crash becomes a recoverable tool-call error — not a lost session.
THE SESSION
Durable event log
State persists outside the harness. A new harness calls wake(id) and resumes from the last recorded event.
~60%
lower time-to-first-token at p50
>90%
lower at p95 — worst-case cold starts eliminated
Vault
credentials stay unreachable from the sandbox — hardened against prompt injection
Managed Agents · capabilities
A full toolbelt, on by default
Eight built-in tools inside the sandbox — enable the set with one toolset type, or allow-list only what a task needs.
- Add custom tools your app executes, and MCP servers for external data and actions
- Free built-in efficiencies: prompt caching, context compaction, package pre-install, GitHub access, webhooks, secure vaults
Permission policies
Auto-approve safe calls, require confirmation for sensitive ones.
Agent Skills
Package reusable expertise and procedures the agent can invoke.
Scheduled runs
Cron-style deployments for recurring, unattended execution.
Multi-agent
A coordinator fans work out to up to 20 specialist agents.
Managed Agents · why it’s better
Ship 10× faster — with measurably better results
Removing the infrastructure burden doesn’t just save time — the managed harness itself lifts task success versus a hand-rolled prompting loop.
10×
faster from prototype to production — days, not months
+10 pts
higher task success — biggest gains on hard problems
Hours
of continuous autonomous work in a single session
$0.08
per session-hour of active runtime, plus standard token rates
Notion
Shipped parallel task execution for coding and content generation within the alpha.
Rakuten
Deployed specialist agents across departments in roughly one week each.
Sentry
Built a bug-to-PR workflow in weeks instead of months.
Vibecode
Cut agent setup time by at least 10× versus their prior stack.
Managed Agents · choosing an approach
Managed Agents vs. the Messages API
| Messages API | Managed Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Direct model-prompting access | Pre-built, configurable agent harness |
| Best for | Custom loops needing fine-grained control | Long-running, asynchronous, autonomous work |
| Infrastructure | You build the loop, sandbox & tools | Fully managed environment & execution |
| State | You persist and manage it | Stateful sessions & filesystem by design |
| Time to production | Weeks to months of plumbing | Days — focus on agent logic & UX |
Reach for Managed Agents when the work is long-running, needs a secure sandbox, or should run on a schedule — and you’d rather not maintain that infrastructure yourself.
Managed Agents · the takeaway
The infrastructure is solved. The implementation is the opportunity.
- The undifferentiated heavy lifting — sandboxing, state, permissions, scaling — is now a managed primitive you no longer have to build
- What’s left is the work that creates value: mapping agents to real workflows, wiring in the right tools and guardrails, earning trust in production
- That’s an implementation problem, not an infrastructure one — where the platform stops and the deployment begins
The question isn’t whether to put agents to work — it’s which of your workflows are ready to run themselves.
PART II OF IV · 15 MIN · VIDEO + NARRATION
The @Claude Tag
Claude as a teammate in the tools your company already lives in.
@Claude tag
What is @Claude tag?
- Tag @Claude in Slack the way you’d tag a coworker — right in the thread
- It reads the thread, uses your company’s tools and context, and does the work
- The result lands back where the conversation is already happening — no new app
- It has its own agent identity and permissions — no personal credentials, it only sees what you let it see
@Claude tag · what it is
A full member of your team
”Claude working as a full member of your team” — launched in Slack first, coming to other platforms over time.
- You and your admins give it permissions — then it works in channels and in private DMs
- Add it to a channel and tell it what work you want it to take on
- This screenshot: Claude added to a launch-prep room, asked to update a pricing page — it just does it
- Then ask once — “monitor this launch room, take on marketing items as they come in” — and it keeps going

@Claude tag · what makes it different
”The four shifts that we’re seeing”
Proactive, multiplayer, memory, async — in her words:
- Proactive — every AI tool until now was reactive: you had to remember to kick off a session. “Ask once, and it handles it for the rest of the channel’s lifetime”
- Multiplayer — teammates jump in as it works: one files the ticket, an engineer adds an edge case, someone else takes the PR into the release
- Memory — say your preference in natural language, in the channel; it remembers. “Co-designing with your team what preferences you have”
- Async — with Claude Code you’re at the machine, steering. Here you “fire off tens, even hundreds of agents on their own cloud VMs — they come back at the end of the day with the final result”

@Claude tag · why now
Claude works for sixteen-plus hours
- ”Our models are able to work for sixteen-plus hours on a single task” — and Claude Tag sets up its own reminders, so that compounds.
- It takes descriptions of entire tasks and executes them over longer periods of time
- Kick off many in parallel — more work done in the same amount of time
- Not one 16-hour task: it checks in every day, on many work streams, doing 16+ hours on each
- ”You go from handing off a smaller task to orchestrating tens to hundreds of these agents working for months”

@Claude tag · the big shift
AI used to be the single-player tool
”We see internally that a lot of our usage is actually multiplayer now."
- "We can just collaborate on these bug fixes much faster — and get higher-quality products to our customers faster”
- Learning how to adopt AI gets much faster too: new hires land in the project channels and see how everyone on their team is using it
- ”There’s nothing more compelling than seeing the most productive engineer’s workflows out in the open” — the best way to adapt your own
- As you become an expert, the people you bring on learn from you — “a very natural education experience built into the workflow”

@Claude tag · the interaction shift
Claude knows when to jump in
- Every AI tool until now was reactive — useful, but only after you remembered to ask.
- Nobody @-mentioned it. It saw the report, did the work, and scheduled its own follow-through
- ”I kept tagging it in channel after channel, then I just got tired of it and told it: please respond every time.” — Boris Cherny, Anthropic

@Claude tag · what changes for your org
Onboarding is faster
- ”Onboarding is much faster if your new hire just opens Slack and starts working with Claude right away.” — Cat Wu, Anthropic
- The work happens in the open — everyone sees how the best users do it, and copies them
- A sales rep merged a pull request: no dev environment, no Git, no terminal

@Claude tag · inside Anthropic
Over half the PRs they merge
- ”Internally, 65% of our product PRs are built by our internal version of Claude Tag — over half of all the PRs that we’re merging."
- "This is what makes us feel confident that this is the next evolution of Claude Code”
- Almost everyone inside uses both: Claude Code for the most complex, hands-on P0 work
- Claude Tag handles everything else — “the easiest way to automate all the menial, tedious tasks you don’t want to do by hand”

@Claude tag · data science
Query the warehouse. Iterate in thread.
Claude Tag is how Anthropic does data analytics — right in the channel.
- Runs SQL, plots, and refines turn by turn
- It flags its own caveats — and answers the follow-ups in the same thread

@Claude tag · GTM / RevOps
Build the pipeline. Chase the replies.
Anthropic uses Claude Tag for RevOps internally — it works the sales pipeline from inside Slack.
- Crosses Salesforce, usage data, and firmographics — then chases every reply
- It keeps the running tally pinned to the thread and nudges the account owners itself

@Claude tag · where it fits
Hands-on vs async
Claude Code and Cowork are your daily drivers — you and Claude, real-time, deep work where you’re driving.
- Claude Tag is a delegation engine embedded where your team already collaborates — hand off in a channel and walk away; many agents at once, over hours and days
- Inside Anthropic almost everyone uses both: Code for your P0s, Tag for everything else

@Claude tag · how to make it land
Work in public
Anthropic believes working in public is the best way to work — and the best way to treat your org.
- Open channels: the shared context your team and Claude both read — not DMs and docs nobody can find
- Steer it together, grant broad access, set a north star, tolerate the mess

@Claude tag · under the hood
Security by default
Enterprise rails, not an afterthought — locked down out of the box.
- The credential closest to the channel wins — scope tight where it matters
- Same auto-mode safety classifier as Claude Code — destructive actions come back as a question
| LAYER | WHAT YOU GET |
|---|---|
| identity | Its own agent identity — never your personal credentials |
| sandbox | Every session isolated; outbound traffic denied by default |
| secrets | Injected through a proxy layer — the model never sees them |
| access | Credential bundles inherit org → workspace → channel; read-only first |
| privacy | Private channels read org memory, never write back — nothing leaks out |
| audit | Every credential use logged, every action traces to its thread — SIEM export |
| spend | Org-level spend caps at setup; per-channel limits on the way |
| training | Anthropic does not train on your company’s Slack data |


OVER TO IAN · HIS SCREEN
Cowork — M&A Due Diligence, Live
Ian takes it from here.
PART III OF IV · 15 MIN · VIDEO + NARRATION
Claude Code — Desktop + Terminal + Section9
My daily driver — the app and the terminal the whole company actually runs on.
Claude Code · reframe
Not just for engineers anymore
It’s a desktop app now — plain English in, finished work out.
- Documents, spreadsheets, research, presentations — not just code
- On your laptop, in your tools — and now on your phone
- If you can describe the task, you can delegate the task


Claude Code · why I live here
Chat answers questions. A company needs work done.
Here, Claude gets hands (your tools), memory (your systems), and a clock (schedules).
- The newest, most powerful features land in Claude Code first — some exist nowhere else
- Desktop and terminal are the same engine: the app carries the loops, dispatch, and connectors — the terminal carries the speed
- And it’s the foundation: every Claude surface runs on the Claude Agent SDK — and the Agent SDK runs on this CLI


Claude Code · what runs from here
Company Stack
Judging criteria:
- Security — enterprise-grade or it’s out: certs checked, subprocessors mapped. Mandatory because of enterprise clients
- Speed = agentic-first — going fast is mandatory for a small company, and fast means no clicking buttons: “if I have to click buttons, it’s a tool I’m not using”
- The vendors are stores, not brains — every workflow lives in my repo, so any tool can be swapped
Claude Code · the mental model
Catch yourself reaching for the mouse
Every time you click through an app by hand, pause: why am I doing this?
- If you can describe the task, you can delegate the task — Claude should be doing it
- That one habit — noticing the clicks — is how a business becomes Claude-native
Claude Code · auto mode
Auto mode: delegate, don’t babysit
Claude works, tests its own changes, and hands you the finished result.
- A year ago you reviewed every single edit the AI made
- You check in at the end — the way you’d review a trusted employee’s work
- Only in Claude Code — it changes what “using AI” feels like



Claude Code · remote agents
Take it anywhere
Kick off and steer agents from your phone — the work runs in the cloud.
- You check in from wherever you are
- Anthropic’s pitch, verbatim: “go to a park, touch grass, and still get your tasks done”
- DEMO


Claude Code · routines
It works while you sleep
Configure once — it runs on a schedule, a webhook, or an event.
- The daily brief, the inbox triage, the new-ticket triage — no human needed to kick it off
- You wake up to finished work and a summary of what happened
- This is the employee model, not the chatbot model

Claude Code · remote control
Your desk, in your pocket
Flip one setting — every session you start on the desktop or CLI shows up on your phone.
- Walk away mid-task, pick up the same session from the couch, the café, the taxi
- Not a mirror — the actual session: read what it did, answer its questions, steer it



Claude Code · dynamic workflows
One prompt, a fleet of agents
One instruction fans out to tens or hundreds of agents in parallel.
- Anthropic’s demo: a website localized to 13 markets — 12 translators + 12 verifiers at once
- Roughly an hour of sequential work, done in minutes — and the workflow is saved, reusable
- This is how the big migrations and the boring repetitive work actually get done
VIDEO / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
PART IV OF IV · 10 MIN · WORKFLOW · AFTER IAN’S HALF
How Section 9 Does FDE Engagements with Claude
Discovery call → transcript → skills → CRM. One pipeline, no manual glue.
FDE engagements · the workflow
The pipeline
From first hello to work delivered — one system carries the lead the whole way.
- The call happens — recording and transcript land automatically
- Claude debriefs it: the plan, the follow-ups, the CRM records
- I review and refine until it’s right — then one approval sends everything
FDE engagements · one real call
One call, zero manual glue
A real 30-minute discovery call — watch what falls out the other end.
- Transcript pulled, debrief written, CRM updated — before the coffee’s cold
- The follow-up email is drafted with the client’s own words in it
- Total human effort after the call: read, approve, send
Under the hood
We use many plugins internally
Every process we run is codified — the business is an installable system.
Under the hood · composition
Plugins depend on plugins
Sales and marketing both stand on the backlog plugin — a real dependency in our system.
- Declared in the manifest, installed as one unit
Under the hood · anatomy
What a plugin is made of
Every workflow becomes a skill, a server, a hook, or an agent — that’s how a business becomes software.
Under the hood · the agent census
How many agents run this company?
Honest answer: depends what you call an agent — so I asked Claude to count itself.
- One of them books my haircuts
- One orders the drinking water
- One hunts down and kills runaway agents
FDE engagements · the point
The system never forgets
Every lead touched, every commitment logged, every thread followed up.
- Nothing lives in one person’s head — the business runs on a system, not on memory
- This is what Claude-native means: the company itself is the workflow
Start here
Your move
- Pick ONE workflow that annoys you every week
- Tag Claude on one real thread — or give the desktop app one real task
- Small, real, this week — that’s how every system in this talk started
Where to next
All the channels, one page — plus these slides at 0xnfrith.com/events · July 17: Claude for FDEs, Chiang Mai