Lenny Distilled

Asha Sharma

Chief Vice President of Product, Microsoft AI Platform

7 quotes across 1 episode

How 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts

We think about it as what season are we in? Season one might've been prototyping of AI and then it was all around models and reasoning models, and now it's the advent of agents. That can last a year, that can last six months, that can last three months.

I really believe in the concept of the full stack builder. You're seeing it with a bunch of the AI native companies that are coming up. I'm even seeing it in enterprises that have been around for 50 years starting to operate in that way. And I think that gives you velocity and throughput.

We're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of the good output is approaching zero. We're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs. The way that you scale to that is with agents. When all of that happens, the org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers.

I think there's a pattern that's starting to emerge for successful companies. One is they are embracing AI and everybody becomes AI fluent. Number two, they start to say, 'Okay, how can I take a process that already exists and apply AI to making it better?' The third thing then is like, 'Okay, great. Now that you've seen impact, everybody is using it, how do you actually use it to inflect growth?'

All of a sudden products aren't just like these static artifacts that we start to ship that's not just like, 'Hey, come up with an idea or an insight. Go solve a problem, ship it into the world, maybe make it a little bit better and then have a dashboard.' All of a sudden, the whole KPI is what is the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome?

Because these models are so effective at this point, you want to start to tune them to certain types of outcomes. All of a sudden, these are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen. I think this is the new IP of every single company products that think and live and learn.

I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource. His ability to generate energy and to use his optimism to renew everybody's dedication to the mission is unbelievable and I think it's such an important part of the culture.