Christmas Eve Reflections: 3 shifts and 3 predictions for 2026. 🎄❄️ Writing this on Christmas Eve as I look at the horizon for next year. The “AI Hype” is settling, and the real architectural shifts are beginning. The 3 Shifts: 1. RAG ➡️ Agents 🕵️♂️: Most chat solutions are stuck in 2024 architectures (Retrieval Augmented …
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You can build software over Zoom, but it doesn’t come close to the magic of in person meetings. For over a year, I’ve been working in the trenches remotely with the incredible teams at Victoria Beckham and Crocus. We’ve shared dashboards, Slack messages, emails, and strategy calls across time zones. But this week, we met …
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If AI Shopping Assistants were Cars.. View on LinkedIn
A lot of “classic” startup advice is about to age very badly. 👀 For years, the default playbook was: focus on a narrow ICP, build a single wedge product that solves one acute pain (a painkiller, not a vitamin), and worry about your “second act” later. Then Rippling happened. Parker Conrad (I’m a big fan) …
A lot of “classic” startup advice is about to age very… Read More »
Just now The Information broke a story that a major retailer’s newly launched chatbot was jailbroken into discussing off-limits topics after a guardrail misconfiguration This is a difficult problem and I understand how stressful it can be for the teams involved. Here is why most of Jailbreaks happen: If you ask a single LLM to …
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170% Net Dollar Retention. In this AI market, that number shouldn’t exist..even the best of AI companies are struggling with massive churn.. My AI meeting notes app (Granola) sent me a “Year in Review.” I was surprised, it was able to dig into my notes and get that number out. It also went a step …
A global luxury brand asked me a blunt question today: ‘Ashu, are these new AI browser assistants going to kill our brand equity?’ It’s a fair question. I’m in Silicon Valley, and the hype around browser-based AI (like Copilot, Gemini in Chrome, etc.) is deafening. But for premium brands like the one I spoke with, …
A global luxury brand asked me a blunt question today:… Read More »
When people ask me for the “secret sauce” to founder productivity, they usually expect a list of obscure, expensive enterprise tools. But the truth is much simpler: the best toolkit is a blend cutting-edge AI with deeply human elements. As a founder, you need systems that give you a 10x head start and also provide …
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Right now, Alhena AI is processing one shopper query every 3 seconds. By Cyber Monday, that will jump to one query every other second. That is a more than 20X surge in architectural load since last year. On days like Cyber Monday or Black Friday, our systems have to scale proportionately with the 2x-3x spike. …
Right now, Alhena AI is processing one shopper query… Read More »
ON THE EVE OF BFCM, OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into a shopping research engine. But, we are not here to talk about that.. 🥁 ANNOUNCING: We are proud to launch Alhena Voice Mode Shopping just in time for BFCM. We are changing how voice is used in shopping based on a core principle: 👉 Voice …
ON THE EVE OF BFCM, OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into a… Read More »