Episode Details

In a Tech Barometer podcast segment, part of a series of interviews with AI company CEOs, founders and leaders, Pendo CEO Todd Olson explains how AI is reshaping how teams work and how it helps tackle time-consuming, complex tasks.

Pendo’s Software Experience Management platform has helped companies like United Airlines, Morgan Stanley and iRobot optimize software performance by identifying issues, streamlining workflows and enhancing usability. To keep it running smoothly, Olson said his engineers now spend more time reviewing AI-generated code than writing it from scratch.

With AI changing not just development techniques, but also the dynamics of software teams, Olson is adjusting to a new paradigm and encouraging others to do the same.

“Everyone needs to rethink their role and how they can do it differently,” Olson said.

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Podcast interview transcript:

Todd Olson: How do you know… There are certain tasks we’re hardwired not to even try because they’re long and painful. That’s where AI can do things really, really easily. AI’s not eliminating all thinking that would be a scary and dangerous place for a lot of folks. It’s just shifting how we work.

Jason Lopez: These days we can see that shift with developers who spend less time writing code and more time reviewing what AI generates, while designers and product teams are using new tools to prototype and test ideas faster than ever. This is the Tech Barometer podcast produced by The Forecast, I’m Jason Lopez. Todd Olson is the co-founder and CEO of Pendo, a company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, which helps developers and product managers make their software more effective and intuitive to use. They do this by integrating into software solutions and AI has become a growing component of that. Olson spoke with us about how AI is reshaping how teams work, especially tackling time-consuming complex tasks.

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Todd Olson: I was talking about this with a few developers recently, is simulating user behavior. Testing can be very, very difficult, but creating real and simulated environments can be just prohibitively expensive and very, very difficult. But it could be very easy with AI. AI can just generate fake users, fake data, whatever. You give it some level of parameters and boom, it’s going to go off and go do it.

Jason Lopez: Olson says that hand coding systems for that kind of task would be much more painful. But with AI, a full simulation is far more efficient than manual testing, and opens up new ways to approach development. It expands what’s possible in the work itself and sparks new ways to collaborate for hybrid teams.

Todd Olson: We’re seeing team members share very openly, wow, look what I did with this. And then another team member saying, wow, I can apply that to my own work and get all this sort of productivity benefits out of it.  I mean, a ton of our folks are recording Loom videos and posting it places and saying, here’s a video of me using AI to solve and experiment with this problem. Have a look. And people are commenting and experimenting. And I just think this is a really exciting time for a lot of folks.

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Jason Lopez: That spirit of experimentation isn’t just cultural — it’s changing the work itself. Develop