YouSaid · the spoken record

Asha Sharma

lines on the record
65
first
2025-08-28
most recent
2025-08-28
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “You can hit me up on LinkedIn Email or text. I think all of those are traceable. Look, how can you be helpful to me is I think we're all early in this journey and great platforms are built on great use cases and built on great customers. And so like if you have feedback, you have ideas, you have like things you want AI to be able to do to help you achieve more. I'd love to hear it. I think the thing about all of these changes is that all of these new products and use cases will be developed everywhere. And so I'm always just thinking about how can we be the platform to support that”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Taekwondo is more mental than it is physical. And so I think that's the same with kind of like all of our jobs and make a product. I think it's like mental clarity. It's courage. It's kind of the ambition to kind of see things through and be unwavering. And so I think that's literally what it taught me outside of meditating, which probably took me the entire time to like actually learn to meditate and clear my head. But yeah, I think it's awesome. Like, I think everybody imagines like, you know, flying psychkaks or running up a wall and like you can do those things too. But the real value is like the mental pursuit of it all, you know?”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “My worldview is like when I'm 70, it's not about what do I look back on in my life and count the number of regrets. It's really about like looking forward in the number of adventures I will still have because I have like accumulated this wealth of skills and trust and people and family and impact and things like that.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I used to use the kind of minimize regret framework. And it's great. And I've used that for a long time. I think that probably once I got into my adult years and started to kind of have a family and things like that, my kind of just worldview changed a little bit. And it was all about maximizing kind of option value. It just gave the things that I naturally cared about like family and health and trust and relationships. Like it was just kind of like a new level of like value associated with those because all of a sudden learning rest on the weekend can like compound in the future or having good health can compound in the future. You don't know you have to trade that off of working extra hours or the importance of family and all of those things. And so I think that like the”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Single person and every single job. And it's like amazing to kind of just spend time with people outside of our bubble and kind of really try and learn what their real pain and problems and how they think about AI and how they think about technology and kind of what we need to do.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's new. It's this year. But I've long worked on products that kind of had that impact. So like when I was at Porch, it was pros at Instacart. We had $600,000 shoppers. And obviously the Home Depot has associates. One of my favorite things about the company culturally is they have this inverted pyramid where instead of having like executives at the top, the associates are at the top. And the stores themselves are headquarters and then the kind of traditional HQ is kind of support. And so it's just like, it's so customer centric. And when I think about amazing execution and creating these durable long-term institutions and kind of how culture and ideology and kind of leadership is formed, like I think about that and I think about at the end of the day, AI is going to have an impact on every”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It's been awesome. The very first board meeting, the head of philanthropy has been at the company for decades, and she said, welcome to the greatest company on the planet.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, I just joined the board of the Home Depot, and we're doing a little renovation project. And so there's this new kind of new to me, DeWalt kind of power pack, and they use pouch cells. And so it's like 50% like lighter, but with all the power. And it's like awesome for drills and things that, you know, I need to lift up with one hand that feel heavy. So I love that. We also are testing out this new brilliant smart home kind of system. So it's like kind of four inches of like high res middleware that allows you to kind of connect to everything. And I've like reached peak kind of with like the explosion of all the technology required to actually use your home. So it just might be the middleware that like sticks, but we'll see.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Formula One saw twice for all mankind. I like season four. I don't know. I like kind of playing out alternative theories to kind of how the space race might have looked.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “At work, it's probably thinking machine. So it's all about treating the cause, not the symptoms, the like, you know, prototypical example is like, you know, if you want to solve traffic, you don't actually put up speed bumps or speed limits. You actually have to solve walkability and mobility and kind of why people actually use cars outside of that. Kind of personally the CMO Vince the Cart recommended to me tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And I read it like last month and last year and the year before because I love it so much. It's like this like beautiful story over 10 years.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think about an ensemble of models as a set of multiple models that then you can fine tune and deploy independently. But at this point, we're all making up different terminology to define things that we like, have deep beliefs on that have limited sets of data points because everything is moving so fast.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To Claude. I'm much more in the model system camp. Like, I believe in model diversity. I think that inexperience, like Claude, like Sonnet for is awesome for a set of use cases versus GPT-5 is different for different use cases. I think that there's some tasks where you care about the latency of the model. You're like cool with the thinking time or you kind of want a quick retrieval and things like that. I think the beauty is there's a lot of models that can kind of help you achieve that. And so I'm much more in the like model system rather than one model to rule them all.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yep, and it could be your own data, it could be data that you buy, it could be synthetic data, could be something else. But I think that we're kind of going to start to see more and more companies and organizations kind of start to think about how do I adapt a model rather than how do I take something off the shelf as is or invest a bunch of money in building my own models.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “An expertise that we've seen isn't everywhere in the world right now. And so it's just a big CapEx investment to do that. And with this explosion of models that we talked about in the beginning, there's a lot of good models to choose from for different domains. And so I think that you just get more leverage economically. You get more leverage from a taste perspective of how you actually want to steer a model if you're actually doing reinforcement learning or some sort of fine-tuning to actually start to optimize what's off the shelf for some outcome like price, performance, quality. If you think about that, that's not crazy, right? Like, you know, ranking is an age-old optimization problem where you don't want to just take what's off the shelf because there's like amazing frameworks and UI and kind of components that, you know, the world, the React components that are out there, you still want to tailor the experience to a set of use cases or set of people.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The way that I think about it is, you know, to create a foundation model, create, it requires a tremendous amount of compute, a tremendous amount of science expertise as we're seeing, which the cost for scientists or the average value is raising dramatically. And I think, you know.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Reinforcement learning. Yes, yes, exactly. Like, I believe we will see just as much money spent on post training as we will on pre-training and in the future more on post-training. We talked a little bit about Nathan Lambert's study where his review was that, you know, when a model hits 30 billion parameters, it makes more sense to kind of fine-tune and optimize that. 50% of developers, according to surveys, are now fine-tuning. And we know fine-tuning is good, but like if you actually go through the whole loop, you can.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We touched on it a little bit, but I think that with the advent of agents and products that think and can act and reason, there's going to be this kind of new wave around RL. And I have a deep belief that that will become one of the most important product techniques kind of over the next season or at least the next few seasons.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's just like that is like it is these sets of things that will move humanity forward and expand our lifetime and give us the privilege to solve 100 year problems. And so that's why I'm excited and that's why I do what I do.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Will my son have classmates in the future? And that's not because agents are going to replace them. It's because the fertility rates are declining, right? Like the average birth rate in the 90s when we were growing up was like three and now it's 2.3. And in 2050, it's estimated to be below replacement. And I think that AI can have such a big effect on it and already is. I was just reading about a hospital in London that's able to improve pregnancy rates by using AI to match eggs and sperms and their cutting costs at the same time. You saw the chat GPT-5 launch yesterday such an amazing story about how ChatGPT is helping in healthcare. Stanford's one of our big customers with the platform that I build and they're working on using AI for tumor reviews.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “What AI will help us do from a workforce perspective, what it will help us do from a healthcare perspective, like my mom has cancer and I think a lot about how, wow, we might find a way to solve the form of cancer she has in my lifetime. And I never thought that was possible three years ago. Like all of that's deeply profound. And the thing that I personally think a lot about now that we know that we're living in this time, working with such powerful technology is the effects of it and how I can best build a platform where people can make use of it. So like the reason why I work at Microsoft is because the whole ethos of the company is like, how do I help people and businesses achieve more? And like more for me in the thing like I think about at night outside of, you know, GPUs is, you know, I think about like.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Okay, I don't know where we're going with that, but that was like, you know, now you're like too much. We've gone too far.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I mean, think about it. We all choose to, you know, someone just said this to me, and I thought it was great. We all choose to close the door on our kids every single day to go work on something. And so you have to work on something that is like deeply moving to you and is like, you know, you have a deep belief that is going to make the world a better place. And like, I think that's why it's vibes. I think you have to follow and have a sense of duty towards a mission that is bigger than yourself.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource. Like this company for 50 years has had every reason not to succeed and it has. And even as it's had early success in the AI era and challenges and other successes and the space is developing so quickly I think that his ability to generate energy and to use his optimism to kind of renew everybody's dedication to the mission is unbelievable. And I think it's such an important part of the culture. Everybody talks about the growth mindset. That's real. Huge part of the culture. But I think the ability to generate energy and clarity on what we need to go do and use optimism to renew the commitment every single day for every single person in an entirely competitive talent space is pretty amazing.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And the right way to retrieve the knowledge. And that's kind of the platform that we've built, but just didn't fully have that picture that those learnings would translate.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And then it was the privacy. Like when you were sending 200 messages a day to the four people you care about most, you want to make sure no one else can read the messages. And so the end-to-end encryption really mattered. And so it wasn't the hundreds of features. It was all in kind of the infrastructure and the platform. Same with Instacart, right? Like there are so many loved features of Instacart. But at the end of the day, it's a billion items that updates 3,000 times every single minute to get homeowners their groceries from the store that they love. And so I think I wish I had known that because I think it would have curtailed my learning curve to say that it's not all the features for the platform that matters. It's the data residency. So the hospital in Germany that's fine-tuning a model can do so in confidence and the data isn't going to leave the region. It's the availability. It's the reliability. Making sure you have the right selection of the tools that enterprises need.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “One on a few premises because one was the phone book. Like, you knew that when you use WhatsApp, you could reach every single person because you had their phone number. And those were the people that you care about when you're using messaging. It was the reliability and how fast it was. Like I could text my grandmother in India.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Map every single room and the single most important thing that we could have done and did during my time there was create a matching platform that matched the six million professionals with the 1,300 service types with the 37,000 zip codes and all of the homeowners in North America to actually take care of their home. And that was just a game of inches and kind of optimizing that engine in order to create higher quality leads, essentially. That's what got us to the first 500 billion 500 million dollar valuation. That's eventually what we built on to actually have other vertical services and software platforms that IP of the company. Same with messaging. The number one learning that I had was look like WhatsApp didn't win because it had stickers or stories or dark mode. In fact, I don't even think it had all of those things when it won.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “When I first took the role, it was kind of described as like the belly of the beast. And I had spent most of my career building products at the center of machine learning and applications or businesses. And I think that to my surprise a lot of the learnings have translated in terms of what makes a great platform is what makes a great product. And like the thing for me is like it's often in the invisible work or the like not the pixels that actually drives that. So like for example one of the first companies that I worked out was a company called Porch Group. I was employee seven and we knew we wanted to help people take care of their home and I think we invented so many features like the home report or like a way to manage your home or like house style inspiration where you could like see all of the houses.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That's customers, 15,000. I think I should re-reference the numbers. 15,000 customers who have produced agents. I think the number of agents is actually like millions”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yes, agents until dank memes. Look, like, yeah, I think the cool thing is something new could come in three months, something new could come in 13 months. I think like we kind of have this conviction on a set of building blocks that we want to provide to enable these agents to endure and have high endurance. And so that's what we're focusing.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Gosh, I don't, but I think that look, like we have, you know, more than 15,000 agents that are deployed on our service today, at least at the Azure service. There's a bunch of other platforms in the company. And I would just say that I think that we should really focus on making sure that we have all of the alignment, accountability, observability, evals to making those agents like great. I think that Manus' breakthrough in the space was that they could do these tool calling loops and have agents kind of do longer running tasks that really no other platform was able to do. I think stuff like that is critical memories, critical. Like there's still a bunch of building blocks that I think are leaving agents incomplete in the wild that I think we have to really. Sweat the details on before we move on.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “With AI, I will say we go through lots of changes to that all the time, and I think we have to just have an openness that that is the business that we're in. I think the other thing is just like we try to leave Slack in the system, not just for the unplanned, but for the slope. I think that we have to continuously be thinking about how we're going to disrupt the platform in our thinking and what we need to be investing into make that possible. And so we tried to do a little bit of both.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Prototyping of AI and kind of the early GPT work. And then it was all around models and reasoning models. And now it's the advent of agents. And so back in last a year, that can last six months. That can last three months. But like grounding everybody on the ethos of what are the secular changes, what are the customer problems we need to solve? What does winning look like? So everybody has that shared sense. What is the North Star metric is something that we do. The second thing that we do is that we have kind of loose quarterly OKR. So like, okay, if we believe that, what do we need to do next quarter to actually put ourselves on a path to that? And then from there, you know, teams are operating in squads and they're kind of setting out, you know, four to six week goals that they're trying to go after for problem areas to go ladder up to that.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I mean, I'll caveat this by saying everyone's just figuring it out, and it's a lot harder to figure it out when you're a larger organization than when you're, you know, much smaller and you get to kind of run something yourself, then there's pros and cons to both. So here's what we do. The company historically, at least in our product teams, had kind of semesters that they planned again. So think of that as every six months. There's kind of a strategy with back before, all of those things. I think that's very valuable. I think the idea of six months, though, and really understanding what's changing out in front is truly challenging to kind of have an overbaked situation. And so we kind of think about it as, you know, what season are we in? And so a season which is very uncomfortable can be denoted by a set of secular changes that are happening in the industry or that are happening from customers. And so, you know, you can think about season one might have been like, you know, the...”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I think that some of the most consequential products in the world. Required a bunch of kind of deterministic, like, logical sets of inputs and like sparks of creativity and imagination and judgment and vision that could not be achieved without humans. Like Microsoft is like the vision of a software factory and creating what Microsoft did wasn't inevitable. Instacart, there was web vans and web vans didn't work, but Instacart did work because of a different way of thinking about it that came through judgment and iteration and a bunch of things that you can have learned unless you actually went through the process, the iPod. Like you go forward. So I think it's there. I think docs themselves for every idea, for every need will just start to kind of fade into applications and different artifacts.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I mean, I think everybody's using AI to write. Everybody's using AI to kind of find ways to have efficiencies and coming up with documentation and things like that. And so I think it's everywhere, which is cool. I think that we're just scratching the surface, though, for kind of like what's possible in terms of working with agents.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “At this point, we have AI and agents and many of our workflows. Like, one of my favorite ones. So, right now are my engineering partners out. So I jump on the live site bridges when something goes down and as something as simple as like you can automatically get a summary of everything that just happened because usually there's 15 people talking you don't actually know where the incident started where it's going to end and everything and then all of a sudden I have that and I can kind of figure out and ask questions and get updates like awesome like I think that kind of the entire kind of DevOps area is changing we use it to we use Spark to create prototypes so everybody on the team is expected to code but like you know sometimes just chatting in and like talking in real words actually gets you to a prototype that's more interesting and like more expressive and reflective of your creativity so we use that”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I think that the same kind of loop that we talked about becomes increasingly important, like fine-tuning and self-healing observability, really good evals, all of that. I mean, the good news is that there are systems that manage this for billions of people today that already exist. And so I think that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There's certainly going to be a bunch of new things to learn if that world ever plays out. But I think, you know, managing devices and policies and group access, all those things are solved problems, which is good.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think today we think in terms of hey, who reports different in the or chart and who's responsible for these areas? And I think at the end of the day, when you have a set of capable agents and people are capable of more things, you're not going to start to think in hierarchy and communicating upward. You're going to start to figure out like kind of outward task-based type of opportunities. I think that humans will always decide in organizations how AI is used and what we want to apply it to. But yeah, it's kind of exciting when a new issue comes up or new tasks comes up. How do you actually automatically decide where to route it, who's working on that task? How do you actually go work on it? How do you observe if the age it's doing the right thing? How do you fine tune it if they're not, like all of those things. So I think that I'm just speculating, right? That there's a world in which that could be pretty exciting. And I think that's great because we can just accomplish more.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I'm pretty excited about it. I think meetings will still be meetings and they'll be weird, but I think they'll be a bit better. And I think there'll be lots of changes. I think that for the average employee, my hope and kind of my optimistic view is that they will be able to expand their skill set because now they have their own agent stack that they can bring with them to work just like you can kind of bring your own device and you can start to have access to a set of skills that you never had before. And so if you think about the 20 million people that maybe sit in that space across America and they get 20% more skilled, that's like pretty exponential for GDP. And so it's pretty fun.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I think that tasks and throughput become more important than they have been before. I also think that you just don't need as many layers. Like I think the whole kind of organizational construct might start to look different in a few years. And so”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Work will look really different. I think that we're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of a good output is approaching zero. And I think when that happens, we're going to see exponential demand for productivity and output. And I think that the way that you scale to that is with agents and it's agents that are embedded and their tools and their pieces of software. And I think there's going to be a ton of those far more than the software that we use today. And then I think there could be a set of embodied agents that are developed. And we start to see that now, right? You can assign a pull request, a copilot. You can create software development rep that's agentic that can kind of do some of the lead generation and mining for you. And so I think that when all of that happens, the work chart starts to become the work chart.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I mean, it's funny. You were telling me about your two year old, and I have my son Rome just turn one, and I can't even imagine life at two because I'm just like, that is so far away. And we'll have then develop. Look, like, I think that in the future,”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yeah, I mean, look, like, I think that it's smart. You should, every company should be bringing AI to where their users are. And ChatGPT has all of their users using Chat, and it's a phenomenal product. And we've got lots of people around the world that do work in many different ways. And we should be thinking about how we use AI to enable that.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I think that conversation is a really powerful interface. I worked on messaging. I think it's great for lots of forms of communication, but it's not the only form of communication. I mean, we use email today to collaborate with each other. We use docs. Like everybody uses Word and PowerPoint. There's a billion people living in places of artifacts that I think can become really important composable pieces of the picture. And I think they should be. I'm excited about that. I think that chat will be important, but certainly not sufficient.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, I mean, look, if any of us knew, that would be amazing. I just think that the reason why terminals are Great, and it feels really great when you code is because of the way it can interact with an LLM with the text stream. And I think that both can be true that humans will continue to commit code and will find new ways to actually do that, whether it's in the IDE, whether it's in GitHub copilot, whether it's in some new development environment. And I think that we'll do that with agents. And agents will do that with each other and will continue to kind of evolve from there.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Something composes, how an agent's going to be able to read something, how do you actually get infinite scale? How does that collaboration start to work? And so I think it's just a new way of thinking, even though it's long been a trend that's happened in these changes.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Think it kind of goes back to what does it mean to kind of be a product maker in the future? I think that everybody's instinct is like is a GUI, but if you kind of think back in history, like databases kind of went from the desktop kind of down into SQL. I think cloud was all about consoles and now it's about Terraform. And so I think we're literally just seeing the same pattern that's played out in history start to play out in AI and like everything else in AI. It's like Moore's Law and it's getting faster. And so I think that's just accelerating. And if you think about like a stream of text just connects better with LLMs. And so I think that there's a bunch of trends that are kind of working in the favor for like the future of products being about composability and not the canvas. And I think that product makers really need to rewire their mindset around this because I think we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the UI of something rather than how”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And we saw a massive difference from when we used synthetic fine tuning to when we annotated 600,000 patient physician interactions by experts and actually fed that into the model and continuously optimized it to then produce, I think we're sitting between 30 and 60 character acceptance rate depending on the run to something like 83%. And so that required a small group of individuals, not a large organization that were able to actually iterate in this loop across functions and kind of all of those lines dissolving.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I think most companies that we're seeing in the space from an AI perspective are doing this. I can tell you about a couple that we're working on. Obviously in the coding space you mentioned cursor GitHub has very similar features that we're using kind of an ensemble of models that have been fine-tuned across 30 different countries, all of the languages to actually then go iterate in a loop for next edit suggestions or code completions and things like that. We've got an AI product called Dragon.”

    2025-08-28 · Lenny's Podcast · How 80,000 companies build with AI: products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026 | Asha Sharma (CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source