Ambar Pansari

LLMs aren’t good enough yet for the general public to use it for shopping… but they’re getting dangerously close. When AI cracks commerce, traffic behavior will change faster than most businesses are ready for.👇

29

1 Comment

I wrote about how product managers should deliberately decide which features should be built to an A grade and which ones should be built to a B or even only a C grade. Making the resource tradeoffs to optimize business outcomes is a core job of product management, and building every capability to an A grade is a poor use of scarce resources. https://lnkd.in/gTXBfNYE

31

4 Comments

U.S. energy demand is surging — don’t get left behind. New gas projects and large industrial loads are reshaping power markets at breakneck speed. In this high-stakes landscape, timely and accurate data is essential. Halcyon’s Data Products, powered by a regularly updated authoritative data catalog of 4.5+ million documents from all 50 public utility commissions, ensure you always have the latest energy market intelligence. Download this guide to see how AI can help power sector stakeholders find new growth opportunities first.

6

My thoughts on the Great Waymo Outage and what it means for human acceptance of AI/technology. Two quick hits. Waymo needs a more graceful failure mode. Just pulling to the roadside might work in a normal power outage but not in, say, a wildfire or in the aftermath of a quake when people need to get out of harm's way. People also need to reconcile that the big, scary outages are easy to fixate on but mask the overall higher levels of safety and reliability we will be seeing from mature (note the word) AI systems. https://lnkd.in/gwnUA_hJ

6

18 Comments

I'm Jeremy Loughnot, and I run The Consilio. We specialize in placing design and creative leaders at venture-backed AI companies — VP of Design, Head of Design, CDO — primarily Series A through C. We also work on engineering and product leadership searches when they're part of the same founding team conversation, because these hires don't happen in isolation. A little about me: 15 years in recruiting, 11 of them at Meta, where I scaled a recruiting team from 22 to 140. I left because I wanted to spend my time doing the work directly — one founder, one search, one placement at a time. How I work: I take a small number of clients at once. I focus on early-to-mid-stage AI companies because that's where leadership hiring decisions have the most leverage — and the highest consequences when they go wrong. Most of the candidates I place aren't actively looking. They're people I've known for years who trust me to bring them something worth their time. What I'm not: not a staffing firm. Not a database. Not a high-volume shop that sends you 50 resumes and hopes one sticks. Every search I run is one I've personally chosen to take on because I believe I can find the right person. If you're building an AI company and thinking about your first design or technical leadership hire — or you're a VC talent partner who works with companies that are — I'd love to connect. #designleadership #AIstartups #executivesearch #venturecapital #startupfounders

58

8 Comments

I've said it before, and it's only becoming more clear: data enrichment is about to explode. Today’s commerce UI is built around human limitations—how much we can read, compare, or decide at once. But AI agents don’t have those constraints. They consume and process massive volumes of information instantly. What they do care about is relevance. Personalization will become entirely agent-driven, and it won’t rely on brand storytelling. It’ll be about matching precise user needs. This raises a tough question: how do you influence product choice when you no longer control the message? It’s especially challenging for smaller brands. In a world where ad targeting gets weaker and web presence becomes the new distribution, strong data quality and deep, niche enrichment will define who wins.

12

I was CPO at Blend before their $4 billion IPO. We rejected the “forward deployed engineer” Palantir model that everyone is copying now. Here’s why: Blend could have followed the forward-deployed engineer approach. Both our CEO and CTO were early Palantir. They'd seen it work. Instead, we built a SaaS product with core components. Move fast, iterate, use data to learn. Not custom code for every client. That Palantir model is having a resurgence. Now Sierra, Decagon, and others are hiring forward-deployed engineers. But it’s not the right approach for every company. It’s fundamentally the wrong answer for Assembled’s customers. Here's what we understand about support teams and why we’re not going the forward deployed route: Customer Support teams are used to getting no resources and no support. On the surface, you'd think they'd be excited about engineers building custom solutions. "Finally, someone's offering us developers!" The reality is support teams are terrified of getting help they can't afford to keep. Support teams are wary because they know the math. They don't have budget for expensive, scarce resources. At some point the shoe drops. The engineers disappear when priorities shift. And custom solutions break. Support is left holding the bag with something they can't maintain. They're resource-starved by design. The idea of a dependency on resources they can't control is terrifying. So instead, the goal should be to give support teams the ability to manage, change, and solve their own problems. Not dependencies on engineers they can't keep. Smart, competent people who teach them to do it themselves. Palantir wasn't even a product company for years. They were a custom development shop with reusable components. Show up, build something bespoke, maybe extract learnings. That's not scalable for any but the largest support teams who need sustainability. Forward-deployed engineers are the new shiny object. I wasn’t a fan of it at Blend. And I’m not a fan today either. What I see in the customer support space is that teams need empowerment, not dependency. I want the teams we work with to be able to say: "I love that you’re partnering with me. And I love that I can do this myself too." That's the difference between building a product and building a consulting practice.

80

6 Comments

We'll learn a lot more about today's outages over the next couple of days as we start to get post mortems from the different platforms that were impacted. But it was interesting to see that traffic on our PNIs to GCP were not impacted uniformly with big traffic drops in LAX, ORD, SEA, SJC and DFW, but increases in traffic in FRA and AMS as customer services failed over. This highlights the important of proper DR planning with a minimum of multi-region and ideally multi-cloud.

825

21 Comments

Oh🚀 Big news: Beekeeper is merging with LumApps to launch the first all-in-one, AI-powered Employee Hub, connecting EVERY employee, whether they’re at a desk or on the frontline. I can't believe what a journey these past 9 years have been - it has truly been a privilege to enjoy every single day working with our team! Along the way we grew Beekeeper from a small Swiss startup to an international scale-up, growing our team 10x while 100x-ing our revenue. I so proud of what we have been able to deliver and the great work our product and engineering teams have done. It has been an honour to lead our Engineering, DevOps and Support teams from our Series-B to our merge with LumApps. Together, we’ll give 7 million users in 2,000+ companies a single home for comms, knowledge, and day-to-day tools, from HQ updates to shift swaps, right on their phones. A huge thanks to Cristian G., Flavio Pfaffhauser, Andreas Slotosch and Daniel Sztutwojner who kicked-off this journey 12 years ago, creating an amazing place to work every single day. I’m thrilled to be part of this next step working alongside Elie Mélois, Sébastien Ricard, Sébastien BOULLE, Kees de Vos, Filip Wieladek, Omar Moling, Daphne van den Brule and our amazing product & engineering teams to create a new European software powerhouse. Dive into the full story ➡️ https://lnkd.in/dGC88MKP #FrontlineSuccess #EmployeeSuccess #AI #FutureOfWork #Beekeeper #LumApps #WorkplaceTransformation

25

3 Comments

This might be obvious but I find that the current models are not [default] smart enough to ask clarifying questions or to help the human pause. Instead the human has to approach with questions, otherwise these models are built as 0 shot execution engines. So many times I'll ask the agent to do something, and then I'll trace my steps back and then ask a question about whether it was the right thing to do and then it will tell me actually no it wasn't the right approach. This is the critical thinking that needs to be built in as it approaches any task. It is fundamental to building any domain agents. I don't believe a single augmented LLM is going to be enough and instead an evaluator/optimizer workflow will be at the core of this. #ai #smartbutdumb

14

1 Comment