A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart
A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart  
Podcast: Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman
Published On: Thu Mar 12 2026
Description: 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.