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)
August 28, 2025
AI Summary
5 min readAsha Sharma, Corporate Vice President of AI Platform at Microsoft, discusses how over 80,000 companies are integrating AI into their products, drawing from Microsoft's work on Azure AI and Copilot. She explains AI's role in evolving products into adaptive systems, flattening organizations, and scaling through autonomous agents.
Scale of AI Adoption
Microsoft supports 80,000 companies building AI applications, up from 20,000 six months prior, using tools like Azure AI Studio for prototyping and deployment. These span retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns for knowledge retrieval, agentic systems for multi-step tasks, and model-as-a-service for custom fine-tuning. Sharma notes common pitfalls like poor data quality leading to hallucinations, recommending structured evaluation frameworks over blind A/B testing.
Products as Living Organisms
Traditional products are static; AI turns them into "organisms" that sense, decide, and act dynamically. For example, Microsoft's Copilot for Sales observes user behavior, suggests next actions, and evolves via feedback loops. This requires new metrics like task completion rates and user delight scores, rather than just engagement time. Sharma distinguishes this from rule-based automation: AI handles ambiguity through probabilistic reasoning.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
What you'll learn
- 1 `* (00:00) **Intro and Asha's Background**`
- 2 `* (03:45) **Defining Products as Organisms**`
- 3 `* (11:20) **Death of Traditional Org Charts**`
- 4 `* (19:10) **AI Agents: Definitions and Rise**`
- 5 `* (27:30) **Building with AI at Scale (80,000 Companies)**`
- 6 `* (35:50) **Warning Signs of AI Implementation Pitfalls**`
- 7 `* (44:15) **Recovery and Application Strategies**`
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Asha Sharma leads AI product strategy at Microsoft, where she works with thousands of companies building AI products and has unique visibility into what’s working (and what’s not) across more than 15,000 startups and enterprises. Before Microsoft, Asha was COO at Instacart, and VP of Product & Engineering at Meta, notably leading product for Messenger.
What you’ll learn:
1. Why we’re moving from “product as artifact” to “product as organism” and what this means for builders
2. Microsoft’s “seasons” planning framework that allows them to adapt quickly in the AI era
3. The death of the org chart: how agents are turning hierarchies into task networks and why “the loop, not the lane” is the new organizing principle
4. Why post-training will soon see more investment than pre-training—and how to build your own AI moat with fine-tuning
5. Her prediction for the “agentic society”—where org charts become work charts and agents outnumber humans in your company
6. The three-phase pattern every successful AI company follows (and why most fail at phase one)
7. The rise of code-native interfaces and why GUIs might be going the way of the desktop
8. What Asha learned from Satya Nadella about optimism
—
Brought to you by:
Enterpret—Transform customer feedback into product growth: https://enterpret.com/lenny
DX—The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers: http://getdx.com/lenny
Fin—The #1 AI agent for customer service: https://fin.ai/lenny
—
Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-80000-companies-build-with-ai-asha-sharma
—
My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/171413445/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation
—
Where to find Asha Sharma:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aboutasha/
• Blog: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/author/asha-sharma/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https:
More from this podcast
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth →