Structured AI Adoption Drives Thought Leadership and Innovation

Key Quotes

"I had like a side project idea this hobby app in my mind about a music player where I can play albums by scanning a QR code on sort of like a piece of paper. I was very jealous of people who had record players... I had no idea how to do that like on my own like I'm not an active developer I can't sit down and write that application and I pulled up cursor and like within a couple of hours I had a working prototype and like that just blew me away."

Brian Greenbaum describes his personal experience using an AI coding tool, Cursor, to rapidly prototype a hobby app. This anecdote illustrates the power of AI to enable individuals without extensive development backgrounds to bring complex ideas to life quickly, highlighting the potential for accelerated innovation.

"I immediately understood that like, okay, this is really cool, it's a sort of side project that's really fun, but I could use this to build interactive prototypes... when you're creating mockups and prototypes that are data driven, it's really hard to communicate what the, you know, how these things are actually going to work with real data. So having a prototype that is code based and is working with even just fake data and an interacting sort of in a more dynamic way is really useful."

Greenbaum explains how his personal project experience directly translated into a professional application for his role as a product designer. He articulates the limitations of traditional prototyping tools like Figma for data-driven features and emphasizes the value of code-based, dynamic prototypes generated with AI for better communication of functionality.

"I was like, listen, I had this like really profound experience and I think, you know, we really need to uplevel the skill of our entire product organization, not just designers, but also PMs. We need to become more familiar with this technology. We need to understand how we can use it."

This quote captures Greenbaum's realization and subsequent proposal to his leadership team. He argues for a company-wide initiative to enhance the AI proficiency of the product organization, recognizing the critical need for designers and product managers to understand and leverage AI tools for future success.

"There's no playbook for how to learn this stuff, there's no classes you can take, there's no book you can read, and the technology is evolving so fast that the only way to really know how to apply it is become very familiar with how it works to kind of stay current with all the latest technologies and the tools and just sort of like see a bunch of examples."

Greenbaum articulates the challenge of keeping pace with rapidly evolving AI technology. He emphasizes that traditional learning methods are insufficient, and the most effective approach is through hands-on familiarity, continuous exploration of new tools, and exposure to practical examples.

"The two things that really matter... one, our teams got to know how to use this stuff like we've just got to know how to use these tools get more done, be more efficient, just use the best of the best. The second one though, I think is really interesting and there's still a lot of opportunity here... to help position Pendo as a thought leader in the space because I knew it was just going to be really important."

Greenbaum outlines the dual benefits of his AI adoption initiative: enhancing internal team efficiency and effectiveness, and establishing the company as a thought leader in the AI space. This demonstrates a strategic understanding of how embracing new technology can yield both operational improvements and market positioning advantages.

"The two-pronged approach: there's an asynchronous and a synchronous one. Thing that I was very familiar with... is that you'll typically hear something like, 'Yeah, that AI stuff, I know it's important, but I just don't have the time.'... and so it was really important for not just there to be a place within Slack and encourage people to share on Slack asynchronously to do it at their own pace, but also to create time in people's calendars so that they can come and focus on whatever the topic is."

Greenbaum details his strategy for driving AI adoption by combining both asynchronous and synchronous learning methods. He addresses the common barrier of time constraints by advocating for dedicated calendar time for focused sessions, alongside a platform for self-paced learning and sharing via Slack.