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)
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What is the background and focus of this episode with Asha Sharma?
You said that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what an agentic society actually looks like.
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 org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers.
We were chatting about this concept you have that we're moving from product as artifact to product as organism.
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.
Planning right now is just crazy. How does anyone plan a roadmap when there's just like, okay, GPT-5's out?
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.
Today, my guest is Asha Sharma, Asha's Chief Vice President of Product for Microsoft's AI platform, where she oversees their AI infrastructure, foundation models, and agent tool chains, while also leading applied engineering, responsible AI, and growth for the Core AI division. She was previously COO at Instacart and VPR product at Meta, where she ran Messenger, Instagram Direct, Messenger Kids, and Remote Presence. She also sits on the boards of the Home Depot. And Kupang, and she is a second degree black belt in Taekwondo. Asha has a really unique and rare role that allows her to see more than most anyone else in the world where things are heading with AI and what works and doesn't work for companies that are building large-scale AI products.
In our conversation, Asha shares a bunch of trends and predictions that she's seeing that I haven't heard anyone else talk about. Why we're moving from a product as artifact to product as organism world. why GUIs are being replaced by code native interfaces, why post-training is the new pre-training, the coming Agentic Society, what it takes to be a successful builder today and going forward, and also her single biggest leadership lesson that she learned from Satya, who she works closely with.
Why are we moving from “product as artifact” to “product as organism”?
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Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter dot com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Asha Sharma. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CXN product orgs like Canva, Notion, Perplexity, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best in-class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time, from gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, and makes it available for your team for analysis and for action. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that customer feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background and focus of this episode with Asha Sharma?
0:00–2:08
2
Why are we moving from “product as artifact” to “product as organism”?
2:08–3:50
3
How is post‑training becoming more important than pre‑training for AI products?
3:50–5:12
4
What patterns do successful AI companies follow and why do many fail early?
5:12–6:40
5
How are full‑stack builders reshaping AI product development?
6:40–8:06
6
What does “the loop, not the lane” mean for modern product organization?
8:06–9:15
7
Why are code‑native interfaces expected to replace traditional GUIs?
9:15–11:09
8
What does an “agentic society” look like and how will agents outnumber employees?
11:09–57:06
Speakers
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