Your Company Has No Model of Itself. Agents Can Build One - Joao Wenzel, Citadel Securities

Every company has someone who knows everything: the reorgs, the politics, which projects are really on track. Joao Wenzel of Citadel Securities explains how his team approximates that person with an agentic system that builds an institutional memory from decks, Slack, meeting notes, code changes and agent traces. Borrowing the idea of a state estimator from robotics, the system updates its beliefs as evidence arrives, lets facts age, grades its own predictions against what actually happened, and takes corrections from people. He shows why simple retrieval isn't enough, how agents catch "watermelon projects" that are green on the outside and red on the inside, and how back-testing showed that projects the agent flagged were twice as likely to slip. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:22 The person who knows everything 1:16 Can agents help with strategy? 1:51 An institutional memory layer 2:18 Top-down and bottom-up evidence 3:05 Borrowing the state estimator from robotics 4:06 Getting data out of a status deck 6:11 The loop: update, age, observe, grade, correct 6:57 Why retrieval isn't enough 7:21 Update: building a record over time 9:12 Age: every fact has a half-life 10:12 Observe: specialist agents beat one big pass 11:12 Grade: back-testing what slips next 12:12 Correct: asking people the right questions 13:17 Bottom-up signals: Slack, PRs and agent traces 15:45 How Citadel Securities uses it 16:38 Open problems 17:24 Takeaways Joao Wenzel https://www.citadelsecurities.com Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!