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. “Oh, it's just going back to our previous discussion on the signals loop and products evolving and becoming these living organisms and not these artifacts. And if you think about getting really good at that loop, I think that is the product. That is the IP. That is the future of every organization. And I think feedback becomes continuous and observability becomes the culture. And I think that functions start to blur in future workforces.”

    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. “Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's all about the loop, not the lane here. And so I think that whatever function you are, you have to be obsessed with trying to understand like the efficiency or the cost of the product, the actual rewards or you know system design that you're going after the actual UI UX, how that actually manifests for agents or people, you have to start to get really good at that really quickly.”

    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. “So I really believe in the concept of a 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 and then gives you the whole loop to start to actually metabolize and go through that much faster.”

    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. “Cloud and mobile, there was like SEO specialists and CDNs and growth BMs and UXR and front end, back end and yada yada. And now I think we're seeing this advent of the polymath and where I think that full stack builders are kind of having their renaissance where if you take like an average organization, it takes probably 10 steps to launch a product. It could be security review, it could be spec. It could be user research. And there's what five plus functions maybe six or seven. I'm being generous for normal organization. And then you have like six or seven layers. So all of a sudden you have 500 different touch points that have to happen to get a product out. And when there are 500 models available a week or 500 new technologies that is insufficient.”

    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. “That end to end. I think the tricky thing is for enterprises is the technology is changing. There's something like 70,000 enterprise tools in the AI space launch last year. It's really hard to know which one you should use for what outcome. And so you really need to bet on a platform or some sort of app server type layer that allows you to swap things in and out and not really be beholden to anything, any one technology or any one tool because the reality is the whole thing is going to change. Feel like you have to actually build for the slope instead of the snapshot of where you are. So that's kind of what I see at the enterprise level. I think the builders themselves are actually changing pretty fundamentally too, right? Every single advent like change of technology has invented like a changing set of roles like mainframes to PCs like the whole garage engineers. And then when we went from server to”

    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. “AI to it, seeing some sort of impact, and then feeling the P&L or the kind of intrinsic benefits that that looks like. 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? And that can be something like improving the customer experience so your LTV or retention improves. It could be co-creating a new kind of set of concepts or categories. It could be, you know, going from agents that are embedded to agents that are embodied and then being able to take on exponential number of tasks. I think that where companies fail is that they're doing AI for AI's sake. They have a ton of projects that they're kicking off at the same time without a blueprint to understand how it actually works from what their stack looks like. And they aren't treating it like a real investment. And so they don't have the measurement and the observability and the evals all kind of set up. It's going 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

  7. “So I think there's things that are kind of more broadly applying to the organization themselves. And then there's things that are applying to the people who are building the AI products too. So more broadly, I think there's a pattern that's starting to emerge for successful companies. Like one is they are embracing AI and everybody becomes AI fluent. So I think everybody's using some sort of copilot or some sort of AI in their day-to-day workflows. Like job one, so everyone's not afraid of it, understands how we can raise the ceiling and kind of lower the floor for like all sorts of skills and tasks. Number two, from there, they start to say, okay, how can I take a process that already exists and apply AI to making it better that might be something like customer support or taking fraud down from 15 days to kind of cure to 10 days and like going through that entire loop of mapping out the process, applying it?”

    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. “100% believe that's where the world is going and that my experience should look and feel different than yours. I mean, that's kind of been the advent in personalization, but now you can do it on the fly in the future. So I think that'll be a pretty fun world. I also think it will look different for agents and it will look different for kind of power users and new users and all of those things too.”

    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. “Look, I think that software as a primitive is changing. You know, software products will all be model forward products, if you will.”

    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. “I think why we're seeing the rise of post training happen is just that the models themselves are so powerful. As of this year, Nathan Lambert did this study that I thought was pretty interesting of all the top leaderboards. And it showed that, you know, once a model hits 30 billion parameters, the CapEx to actually train a model and put billions of tokens into kind of pre-run kind of doesn't economically make sense. And you can kind of start to optimize on the loop. And so, yeah, in many ways, I think you can, I think using your own data is the best way to do that, but you can synthetically generate data. You have to come up with the rewards design. You have to actually roll it out. You have to A, B, test it rigorously. You have to find the job to be done or the use case that it makes the most sense for. And then, yes, like that generates data that you can learn from. I haven't ever seen it be one loop for any sort of product. I think it's 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

  11. “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 outcome, so there's price or performance or quality. And so it's pretty exciting because all of a sudden these are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen. And in many ways, I think this is the new IP of every single company. And it's a completely different way to build product and to even think about products that think and live and learn, which is kind of exciting.”

    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. “It's been a pretty interesting shift, especially over the last year or so, because when I got to Microsoft, it was kind of right after OpenAI and the large foundation models happened. And then immediately after there was this explosion of models, proprietary open, frontier models that were pushing the frontier curve. And so they were both more efficient. And then we started to see domain level expertise and a bunch of them. And then even more recently models now canol and they can function call and they can take action. And I think that's just giving way to a new type of products that are starting to see some success. And so all of a sudden, products aren't just like these static artifacts that we start to ship. It'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,”

    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. “We think about it as what season are we in? Season one might have been prototyping of AI, and then it was all around models and reasoning models. And now it's the advent of 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

  14. “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.”

    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. “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 output, the way that you scale to that is with agents. When all of that happens, the orc charge starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers.”

    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