A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart

A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart

From Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman by Scott Hanselman

March 12, 2026 · 31 min · Episode 1040

About this episode

Scott Hanselman discusses with Allen Stewart how AI agents with persistent memory are revolutionizing scientific research.

Scott Hanselman sits down with Allen Stewart, Partner Director of Software Engineering at Microsoft, to explore how AI agents with persistent memory are transforming scientific research and software engineering. Allen explains how his team built an AI system that learns from every investigation turning a 12-day autonomous drug discovery run into reusable knowledge that makes future research exponentially faster. Instead of starting from scratch each time, the AI inherits hypotheses, methodologies, and findings from previous work, saving hundreds of millions of tokens and weeks of effort.

People in this episode

Host: Scott Hanselman

Guest: Allen Stewart

Topics covered

  • AI
  • scientific research
  • software engineering
  • drug discovery
  • persistent memory

Keywords

  • AI agents
  • persistent memory
  • scientific research
  • software engineering
  • drug discovery

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Microsoft

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