This week’s guest is Brooke Hopkins, Founder of Coval, a company building automated testing infrastructure for AI agents starting with voice and chat assistants.

We unpack her journey from studying in Abu Dhabi to leading simulation infrastructure at Waymo, where she helped ensure autonomous vehicles could operate safely at scale. Brooke shares how that experience shaped Coval’s approach to agent evaluation, why voice is the hardest modality to test, and what it means to simulate human-to-agent interactions in a way that actually reflects user intent.

Episode Chapters:

1:54 - Abu Dhabi for college
4:06 - Searching for engineering challenges
5:08 - Joining Waymo
9:00 - Scaling simulations
10:17 - Balancing cost, latency, and signal
14:40 - Starting with voice
18:16 - Building evals
23:44 - Persona surprises
26:50 - MCP
27:15 - AI operating system for conversational workflows
32:28 - Voice to voice
35:55 - Quick fire round

As always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

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E59: Simulation as Strategy with Brooke Hopkins (Coval)