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)

Overview

This episode features Asha Sharma, CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft, discussing the transformative impact of AI on product development, organizational structures, and the future of work. She shares insights on the shift from product as artifact to product as organism, the rise of agents, and the evolving role of reinforcement learning in AI. Asha also provides a glimpse into Microsoft's adaptive planning framework and her leadership lessons from Satya Nadella.

Notable Quotes

- The org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers. – Asha Sharma, on how agents will reshape organizational structures.

- Optimism is a renewable resource. – Asha Sharma, on a key leadership lesson from Satya Nadella.

- It's all about the loop, not the lane. – Asha Sharma, emphasizing the importance of continuous feedback and iteration in product development.

🧬 From Product as Artifact to Product as Organism

- Asha describes the evolution of products from static artifacts to dynamic, learning organisms.

- Modern AI models enable products to improve continuously through user interactions, creating a feedback loop that becomes the new intellectual property (IP) of companies.

- This shift requires companies to focus on tuning models for specific outcomes like price, performance, and quality.

🤖 The Rise of Agents and the Death of the Org Chart

- Asha predicts an agentic society where agents (AI tools) will outnumber employees in organizations by 2026.

- Agents will handle tasks autonomously, transforming hierarchical org charts into task-based networks.

- This shift will empower employees with personal agent stacks, enhancing productivity and skill sets.

- Companies must prioritize observability, alignment, and evaluation to manage the growing complexity of agent ecosystems.

📈 The Three-Phase Pattern of Successful AI Companies

- Asha outlines a three-phase framework for AI adoption:

1. AI Fluency: Ensuring all employees understand and use AI tools.

2. Process Optimization: Applying AI to existing workflows for measurable impact.

3. Growth Inflection: Leveraging AI to create new categories, improve customer experience, and scale tasks exponentially.

- Companies fail when they pursue AI without clear goals, measurement systems, or adaptability to rapid technological changes.

💻 The Shift from GUIs to Code-Native Interfaces

- Asha highlights the decline of traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in favor of code-native and composable interfaces.

- Text-based streams align better with large language models (LLMs), enabling faster and more scalable product development.

- This trend challenges product makers to rethink design, focusing on composability and agent collaboration rather than static UIs.

🔄 The Growing Importance of Post-Training and Reinforcement Learning

- Asha predicts that post-training (fine-tuning models with custom data) will soon surpass pre-training in investment.

- Reinforcement learning (RL) will become a critical product development technique, enabling companies to optimize models for specific use cases.

- This shift will drive the creation of new infrastructure and platforms tailored to post-training and RL workflows.