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Published · transcript-backedAishwarya Naresh Reganti: recommendation
11 Jan 2026 Lenny's Podcast Why most AI products fail: Lessons from 50+ AI deployments at OpenAI, Google, and Amazon
“I think we did cover a bunch of best practices for AI products, which is start small, try to get your iteration going well and build a flywheel and all of that.”
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- Aishwarya Naresh Reganti
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- recommendation
- Recorded
- 11 Jan 2026
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- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Awesome. I just saw Demis from DeepMind, AI, Google, whatever they call the whole org, talking about this where he thinks that's going to be a big part of where they're going, combining the image model work, the LLM, and also their world model stuff, Genie, I think is what it's called. Yes. So that's going to be a wild, wild time. Okay. Last question. If someone wants to just get better at building AI products, what's just maybe one skill or maybe two skills that you think they should lean into and develop? I think we did cover a bunch of best practices for AI products, which is start small, try to get your iteration going well and build a flywheel and all of that. But again, if you kind of look at it at a 10,000 feet level for anybody building today, like I was saying, implementation is going to be ridiculously cheap in the next few years. So really nail down your design, your judgment, your taste and all of that. And in general, if you're building a career as well, I feel for the past few years, your former years, say the first two, three years of building your career is always focused on execution, mechanics and all of that. And now we have AI that could help you ramp pretty quickly and post that. I mean, after a few years, I think everybody's job becomes about your taste, your judgment and kind of what is uniquely you. I think nail down on that part and try to figure out how you can bring in that kind of a perspective. It doesn't have to mean that you should be significantly old, have years of experience. We recently hired someone and we use this very popular app for tracking our tasks and we've been using it for years and we pay a high subscription fee for it. And this guy just came with his own vibe coded app to the meeting. He onboarded us to all of it and he's like, "Okay, let's start using this." And I think that kind of agency and that kind of ownership to really rethink experiences is what will set people apart. And I'm not being blind to the fact that vibe coded apps have high maintenance costs. And maybe as we scale as a company, we have to replace it or we have to think of better approaches. But given that we are a small size company now and just ... I was really shocked because I never thought of it. If you've been used to working in a certain way, you associate a cost with building. And I feel like folks who grew up in this age have a much lower cost associated in their mind. They just don't mind building something and going ahead with it. And they're also very enthusiastic to try out new tools. That's also probably why AI products have this retention problem because everybody's so excited about trying out these new tools and all of that. But essentially having the agency and ownership, and I think it's also the going to be the end of the busy work era. You can't be sitting in a corner doing something that doesn't move the needle for a company. You really need to be thinking about end-to-end workflows, how you can bring in more impact. I think all of that will be super important. That reminds me, I just had Jason Lemkit on the podcast. He's very smart on sales, go to market, run Saster, and he replaced his whole sales team with agents. He had 10 salespeople and then he was 1.2 and 20 agents. And one of the agents, it was just tracking everyone's updates to Salesforce and kind of updating it automatically for them based on their calls. And one of the salespeople was like, "Okay, I quit." And it turned out he wasn't really doing anything. He was just sitting around and he's like, "Okay, this will catch me. I got to get out of here. So to your point about, it'll be harder to sit around and twiddle your thumbs, I think is really right.…
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