Asha Sharma
Products as organisms, the death of org charts, and why agents will outnumber employees by 2026, covering AI product work, product design, and engineering tradeoffs.
Episode
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)
Summary
CVP of AI Platform at Microsoft discusses the shift from 'product as artifact' to 'product as organism' — products that continuously learn from interactions. She argues the org chart is becoming the 'work chart' as agents eliminate layers, and makes a strong case that post-training and reinforcement learning will become more strategically important than pre-training for most companies building on foundation models.
Key Takeaways
Think of AI products as 'organisms' rather than artifacts — they get better with every interaction. Companies that build feedback loops for model improvement will compound faster.
The org chart will collapse into a 'work chart': as agents take over discrete tasks, you need fewer management layers. Plan for this structurally.
Post-training (fine-tuning, RLHF) will attract as much investment as pre-training. You can achieve better results for your use case by adapting an existing model rather than building from scratch.
Use a 'model system' (ensemble of models) rather than one model for everything. Route intelligently across models based on task requirements.
Don't do annual planning for AI products — treat model capability releases as external forcing functions and build adaptive planning processes.
Notable Quotes
“If you think about that, that's not crazy, right? Ranking is an age-old optimization problem where you don't want to just take what's off the shelf because there's amazing frameworks and UI and components that the world is react components that are out there. You still want to tailor the experience to a set of use cases or a set of people. I think it's just the same industrial logic.”
“It's going to do 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 launched 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 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.”
“I think that some of the most consequential products in the world required a bunch of deterministic, logical sets of inputs and sparks of creativity and imagination and judgment and vision that could not be achieved without humans. Microsoft is the vision of a software factory and creating what Microsoft did wasn't inevitable. Instacart, there was web bands and web bands didn't work, but Instacart did work because of a different way of thinking about it.”