AI CXO

Head of AI at Box: “Agentic” Has Become a Meaningless AI Buzzword...

90% of enterprise knowledge is locked in unstructured content. Most companies have no idea how to use it.

In this episode, Yashodha Bhavnani, Head of AI at Box, breaks down what it actually takes to get real value from AI in the enterprise. Not the buzzwords. Not the experiments bolted onto the side of a product. The real infrastructure decisions that determine whether your AI strategy succeeds or stalls.

She covers why the right model is irrelevant if your AI cannot see your data, how Box built its agent directly into its core product stack instead of shipping it as a sidecar experiment, and why enterprises face a governance and context problem that most AI vendors are not solving.

She also shares the three-part future of work every product team and executive needs to plan for, what the J-curve of AI adoption actually feels like from the inside, and why the word "agent" has officially become meaningless.

In this episode you will learn:
[0:00] Why 90% of enterprise knowledge is stuck in unstructured content
[1:26] Yashodha Bhavnani, Head of AI at Box, on the era of context
[2:08] Why your AI strategy needs a content strategy first
[5:03] How enterprises should organize their data for agents
[8:06] The two layers of AI governance: hard security vs. contextual control
[10:05] How Box thinks about permissions, compliance, and agent guardrails
[10:53] The unstructured content explosion and what it means for your data stack
[14:10] Principles Box uses internally to stay efficient and sane
[16:27] How to build AI products that serve both humans and agents
[18:26] Why this is a culture shift, not just a technology shift
[20:43] The decision to build Box Agent into the core product, not alongside it
[23:36] Three lessons for anyone leading an enterprise AI strategy
[26:13] Will there be more agents than humans at work?
[28:09] A real customer example: AI freeing analysts from lease compliance grunt work
[30:25] How Box is adopting AI internally and what the growing pains look like
[33:14] Rapid fire: the deeply held belief about AI that will be destroyed in two years
[34:28] The one AI buzzword Yashodha would ban from every meeting
[35:51] What she is most optimistic about with AI in the workplace

Whether you are a CXO, product leader, or enterprise builder trying to move from AI experimentation to real deployment, this conversation gives you the clearest framework yet for unlocking your unstructured data, governing your agents, and building AI that actually sticks.

#AIStrategy #EnterpriseAI #AIAgents #ProductManagement #FutureOfWork #BoxAI #UnstructuredData #CXO #KnowledgeWork #AILeadership

How Zapier transformed itself with AI for a world with AI

Wade Foster, CEO & Co-Founder of Zapier, reveals how a $5B company transformed overnight when GPT-4 launched. Learn his "Code Red" strategy, AI adoption secrets, and why the future of software belongs to AI agents.

When GPT-4 launched, Wade Foster didn't wait. He called a code red. In this conversation, he shares exactly how Zapier went from 10% to 97% company-wide AI adoption in months, why he focuses on building "AI fluency" over quick wins, and what he believes every CEO needs to know about the AI-driven future.

We cover:
- The "Code Red" moment: Why and how Zapier decided to transform everything
- From 10% to 97%: The real drivers behind achieving company-wide AI adoption
- The AI Fluency Rubric: Building institutional AI capability vs. tactical AI use
- The future of software: Why agents (not humans) will write and use software
- The 3% that didn't adopt: Why some teams resist and how to bring them along
- Advice for late-moving CEOs: What to do if you haven't started yet
- Buzzwords Wade would ban from meetings
- Why "context" and "agent" are overloaded terms in AI discussions

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
02:08 - How calling Code Red transformed the company
03:02 - The immediate impact: From 10% to 50% AI adoption
05:09 - Building the AI Fluency Rubric and institutional change
07:18 - How Zapier achieved 97% adoption (and what about the 3%?)
09:08 - The difference between adoption vs. sustained usage
12:37 - Making employees retry AI tools even when first attempts failed
15:59 - Infrastructure for embedding AI into workflows
19:25 - The future of software: Agents as creators and users
31:58 - What will Zapier look like in 3 years? Agent-native platforms
34:04 - Setting up governance for AI agents to write code safely
39:17 - What beliefs about AI building today won't make sense by 2028?
42:02 - Buzzwords Wade wants to ban from AI conversations
43:18 - Final advice for CEOs who feel they're late to AI

KEY INSIGHTS:
- The quality gap between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was so vast it rewritten everything for Zapier
- A company-wide hackathon forced everyone to play with AI (80%+ participation was key)
- Building the muscle for AI adoption matters even when the initial output isn't directly used
- Entrenched workflows and quality concerns are the biggest blockers to adoption
- Support and encouragement to "try again in 3 months" is critical
- The shift isn't just more software, it's that agents will write that software
- Governance and guardrails for agents are the new infrastructure CEOs need to set up
- AI maximalism paired with realistic change management is the winning approach

PERFECT FOR:
- Product leaders and GTM professionals navigating AI transformation
- CEOs and C-suite executives feeling pressure to move faster on AI
- Engineering leaders building AI-fluent organizations
- SaaS founders and entrepreneurs building AI-native products
- Anyone curious about how category-defining companies adapt

Wade Foster brings the strategic clarity and operational rigor that made Zapier the automation standard. This episode cuts through the AI hype to the real work of transforming organizations.

#WadeFoster #Zapier #AI #CEOAdvice #AIAdoption #ArtificialIntelligence #SoftwareDevelopment #ProductStrategy #Automation #AIAgents #Leadership #GPT4 #Technology #BusinessStrategy #GTM

ABOUT WADE FOSTER:
Wade is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zapier, the #1 automation platform connecting 7000+ apps. He's been building Zapier since 2011 and has grown it into a $5 billion company used by millions of businesses to automate daily workflows. Wade is deeply focused on AI's impact on software development and organizational productivity.

DISCLAIMER: This conversation reflects Wade Foster's views and experiences. Viewers should consult their own experts before making strategic or business decisions.

Inside Replit: How a VP Runs a $9B AI-Native Company

How Replit's VP of Ops Runs an AI-Native Company (And Why Most Enterprises Are Still Getting It Wrong)

Jonathan Eide has built and scaled operations at Meta, Coinbase, and now Replit, the company that's quietly become one of the fastest-growing AI-native businesses on the planet. In this conversation, he breaks down what's actually different about running a company where every function builds their own software, why "vibe coding" is too lightweight a term for what's coming, and the hiring shift every CXO will face in the next 24 months.

If you're a CXO trying to figure out how to move your org from "we use Copilot" to genuinely agentic operations, this is the playbook.

What we get into:
The two archetypes Replit hires for, and why the "perfect candidate" has both
Why Jon hasn't written a Linear ticket by hand in months (and what replaced it)
The internal AI analyst tool that replaced an entire junior analyst function
How Replit killed Google Slides internally with a self-updating, self-populating weekly wins deck
Why measuring AI productivity by tokens or time saved is the wrong move (Theory of Constraints, applied)
The hiring shift: from screening interviews to "build me a demo before we talk"
What enterprise adoption actually looks like at Zillow, Atlassian, and old-school PE-backed manufacturers
Why Replit's "plan" is to not have a plan, and why vision/mission still has to be rock solid
The single-person companies hitting tens of millions in ARR
Rapid fire: the deeply held belief about AI that Jon thinks will be gone by 2028

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:16 Jonathan Eide 
02:00 What's fundamentally different about running ops at an AI-native company
04:20 How every function at Replit is building its own tools
07:35 Killing PowerPoint: the internal weekly wins deck built in Replit
11:35 Source of truth, guardrails, and avoiding the "everyone builds an app" sprawl
14:20 Can large or legacy companies actually adopt this operating model?
18:15 Why measuring tokens and time saved is the wrong way to track AI productivity
22:20 How Jon redesigned his interview process for AI-native hiring
25:35 Are AI-native companies hiring fewer people, or different people?
28:25 Why "AI native" will disappear as a hiring filter
29:15 Growing at Replit's pace: planning when the market resets every two weeks
32:24 Replit's three user segments: hobbyists, prosumer entrepreneurs, enterprise
34:41 Surprising businesses being built on Replit (and the single-person unicorn thesis)
37:30 The plan is to not have a plan: vision vs short-term flexibility
40:36 Rapid fire: the belief about AI that will be destroyed by 2028
41:32 Rapid fire: the one AI buzzword Jon would ban from Replit meetings
42:27 Rapid fire: what Jon is most optimistic about

About Jonathan Eide:
Jonathan is VP of Operations at Replit. Prior to Replit, he held senior operating roles at Coinbase and Meta, leading data and operations functions through hypergrowth phases at both.

About the AI CXO Podcast:
The AI CXO Podcast helps CXOs get actionable insights into how to navigate AI's reshaping of the business landscape. New episodes drop weekly.

Subscribe for more conversations with operators building the AI-native enterprise.
https://www.youtube.com/@productfaculty 

#AI #Replit #CXO #VibeCoding #EnterpriseAI #AINative #AIAgents #FutureOfWork #ProductLeadership #Operations

How to Become an AI-Native Organisation (And What Most Companies Are Getting Wrong)

Noam Lovinsky is the CPO of Superhuman, formerly a product leader at YouTube and Meta. In this episode from Product Faculty AI CXO Podcast, Noam breaks down what it actually takes to build an AI-native organization, and why most companies are getting it completely wrong.

We cover the Grammarly to Superhuman rebrand, how you trade 16 years of brand equity for a bigger bet, what "model to pixel" execution really means at 100 billion LLM calls a week, and why Noam now requires every candidate to demo AI live in their interview.

This is not a conversation about AI tools. It's about what fundamentally changes when the cost of execution heads toward zero, and what that means for every leader, PM, and builder right now.

What we cover:
- The #1 mistake companies make when rolling out AI top-down
- Why every PM on Noam's team is expected to push code to production
- How Superhuman restructured hiring around live AI fluency
- What a world-class PM does that AI still cannot
- The one thing Noam would tell every executive in the world right now
- Why long-term planning is the first mental model you need to throw out

Who this is for: Founders, C-suite executives, product leaders, and ecommerce operators trying to understand what AI agents mean for their business right now.

Subscribe for weekly conversations with top executives navigating the AI era.
https://www.youtube.com/@productfaculty 

#ShopifyAI #AgenticCommerce #AIAgents #FutureOfEcommerce #AIShoppingAgents #Shopify #EcommerceStrategy #AICXOPodcast #AIForBusiness #ProductLeadership #CommerceProtocol #USDC #CryptoPayments #AIRetail #ManiShopify

VP Shopify: "Your Future Customers Will Be Humans, and Agents"

What happens to your brand when AI buys for your customers, not them?

Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify, breaks down the biggest shift in commerce since the smartphone. In this episode, we go deep on agentic commerce: what it actually means, how merchants should prepare, and what happens to brand loyalty, conversion funnels, and the customer relationship when AI agents start making purchasing decisions autonomously.

Mani shares Shopify's internal "crawl, walk, run, fly" framework for thinking about AI-driven commerce, walks us through SimGym (their simulated AI buyer testing environment), and explains the Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol built on programmable USDC. This is one of the most grounded, executive-level conversations on AI agents and the future of retail you'll find.

What we cover:
- Who really owns the customer relationship in an agentic world: the brand, the platform, or the AI?
- The four stages of agentic commerce and where most businesses are today
- Why brand loyalty is not going away, and how the "human persona" vs "agent persona" changes merchant strategy
- Shopify's SimGym: running A/B tests with simulated AI buyers before going live
- How the Universal Commerce Protocol changes discovery, interaction, and transaction
- The Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol and why programmable money matters for global merchants
- Why decision-making, not execution, is your real bottleneck in an AI-first world
- How Shopify is using its merchant data advantage to stay ahead with Sidekick and Sidekick Pulse

Guest: Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify

Who this is for: Founders, C-suite executives, product leaders, and ecommerce operators trying to understand what AI agents mean for their business right now.

Subscribe for weekly conversations with top executives navigating the AI era:
https://www.youtube.com/@productfaculty 

CPO at Slack on Becoming product-centric, strategy, and AI

Tamar, former CPO at Slack and a Venture Partner at IVP, has a rich history of leading and delivering innovative products on a massive scale. Previously, as the Chief Product Officer at Slack, she guided the product, design, and research sectors, witnessing a 10x revenue surge, the company's public listing, and its eventual acquisition by Salesforce. Prior to Slack, Tamar served as Vice President at Google, where she held pivotal product and engineering leadership roles, significantly contributing to flagship products like Search, Identity, and Privacy. In addition to her remarkable career, Tamar sits on the board of several public and private companies.

In today's episode, we discuss:

- Tamar’s fascinating journey through tech
- What worked and what didn’t work at Google, Amazon and Slack
- Why should we prioritize customer-centricity
- Tactics to stay ahead of the trends
- How to create a believable and compelling product strategy
- How to keep your team motivated
- How to manage alignment
- The potential of foundational product management in driving growth
- Diverse processes that can fit different organizational structures
- The best OKRs
- Impact of AI

 

Where to find Tamar Yehoshua:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamar-yeh...
Substack: https://substack.com/@tamaryehoshua

Where to find Moe Ali:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productfa...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/productfaculty
ProductFaculty: https://www.productfaculty.com/

VP of Product at WhatsApp on Optimizing your product, career, and decision-making | Ami Vora

Ami Vora is the Chief Product Officer at Faire, an online wholesale marketplace last valued at $12.59b. She has a wide array of experience in tech, having been an early employee at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. She has also held a variety of roles, spanning product, marketing, and even operating Facebook’s VC fund (fbFund). Alongside her impressive career, Ami writes insightful blog posts about scaling tech products, teams, and cultures, and we unpack some of those posts in this conversation.

 

In today's episode, we discuss:

• Ami’s fascinating journey through tech
• Tactical advice for forming a product vision and strategy
• What product simplicity means, and how to achieve it
• Some of Ami’s most popular career and product frameworks
• Advice for operating amidst uncertainty
• How to optimize your career like a product

Where to find Ami Vora:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amvora/

Substack: https://substack.com/@amivora

 

Where to find Moe Ali:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productfaculty

Twitter: https://twitter.com/productfaculty

ProductFaculty: https://www.productfaculty.com/

 

Referenced: Facebook’s VC fund (fbFund) that Ami operated: https://medium.com/swlh/fbfund-the-investment-fund-youve-never-heard-of-that-helped-start-lyft-bc57ee661162

Faire: https://www.faire.com/

“If I can see a problem, it’s mine to solve” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/if-i-can-see-a-problem-its-mine-to

“It’s not prioritization until it hurts” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/its-not-prioritization-until-it-hurts

“Listen, Document, Decide” blog post: https://amivora.substack.com/p/learning-to-make-decisions-in-a-new

 

Timestamps:

[00:00:59] Ami's background

[00:02:48] The mentality of leaving Microsoft for a temp role at FB

[00:05:06] Advice for forming a product vision and strategy

[00:09:12] What it means for a product experience to be "simple”

[00:10:24] How to create simple product experiences

[00:10:52] The "Listen, Decide, Document" framework

[00:12:23] Ami's attitude to prioritising amidst uncertainty

[00:13:37] Getting comfortable with making wrong decisions

[00:15:48] It's not prioritization until it hurts

[00:16:36] How to optimize your career like a product

[00:18:52] How to make time for career development

[00:20:53] If you see a problem, it's yours to solve

[00:23:03] Leadership and career hack: Upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0

[00:25:30] How to solicit valuable feedback

[00:27:35] The future of PM and how to stay ahead of it

VP of Product at Shopify on Decision Making and Mental Models

In this episode, we speak with Brandon Chu (former VP of Product at Shopify) about why product managers need to make high-conviction decisions to propel their product and career success. We discuss why the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mindset is still critical for launching successful products. Additionally, we explore the mental models PMs need to expedite their product success.

Shreyas Doshi on Successful Teams, Product and Careers

This podcast with Shreyas Doshi, the most followed product leader in the world, we cover a range of topics on Successful Product Teams, Products and Careers. Listen in to hear: Why the most successful product companies still launch failed products. Why you need courage to be able to build products that are going to be successful. How AI is going to impact your Product Management career. 

CPO of Thumbtack on Structuring Product Teams

In this podcast, you'll hear from P.J. Linarducci, the CPO of Thumbtack, on structuring product teams. It turns out that organizational structures are all flawed, and it's a myth that there is one "perfect" solution. Learn about the four-step process to ensure that you have the best structure to meet your needs, and discover when it makes sense to adapt it.