How Laravel Uses AI Across Finance, Legal, HR, and Sales

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten.  T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com. In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Tom Crary, President and COO of Laravel, for a rare look at AI on the business side of a fast-growing, PE-backed company — not the coding side everyone talks about. Tom walks through how his team leads with security and trust (including a custom data agreement and a hard line around financial systems), then puts AI to work everywhere else: board decks that dropped from 30 hours to under 8 to create, contract review that cut outside legal spend by 70%, and non-developers shipping their own internal apps. He's candid about the failures too — a comp-plan math error that slipped past every human reviewer — and about runaway token spend and why he refuses to make a leaderboard out of it. The conversation closes with an unexpected turn into AI-assisted biohacking, where Tom feeds genome data, blood work, and wearables into structured data to work around the context window — and a speed round on where all of this is actually headed. Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer Tom Crary on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-crary-01246510 Tom Crary on X - https://x.com/TMoney1371 Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/ Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/ ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/