Pendo Appoints Zain Lakhani as Chief AI Officer to Accelerate AI Product Development

Pendo, a leader in product intelligence, has taken a significant step forward by appointing Zain Lakhani as its inaugural Chief AI Officer. His primary responsibility will be to oversee the development of AI-driven products, focusing on enhancing the company's agentic offerings. This appointment comes as the software development sector evolves rapidly due to advances in artificial intelligence.

Lakhani previously founded and scaled LightCI, an AI engineering firm, and brings extensive experience to Pendo. Under his leadership, LightCI grew to 250 employees and generated $100 million in revenue within four years, collaborating with major companies such as Google, Apple, and OpenAI. His deep understanding of AI systems will be essential in helping Pendo refine its product development and deployment processes.

Todd Olson, Pendo's CEO, emphasized the need for tools that keep pace with the fast-changing software development environment. "The software development lifecycle is being totally disrupted," Olson said, noting how teams can now ship products faster than ever thanks to AI. Lakhani's expertise is expected to play a crucial role in rethinking observability for AI builders, adapting the Pendo platform to meet these new demands.

Reporting directly to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani, Lakhani's mandate includes enhancing production-grade AI systems across the company's architecture, product development, and partnerships. He has previously contributed to Pendo's Agent Analytics, an observability solution designed to measure the performance and business impact of AI agents, as well as the Novus product agent, which automatically identifies and resolves usability issues in real-time.

Reflecting on the industry shift, Lakhani observed, "Product managers used to spend their days looking at dashboards. Now they're product engineers shipping code using agents — today's analytics tools can't keep up with the pace." This underscores a fundamental change in how organizations approach product management, creating a need for tools that deliver real-time insights and analytics.

Pendo's recent progress in AI development is highlighted by its recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2026 and the general availability of its MCP Server. The company also launched the Pendo Agent on the Google Marketplace and formed new partnerships with Fin, Planview, and Atlassian to enrich product context for their respective agents. These initiatives reflect Pendo's commitment to enhancing user experience through data-driven insights.

With Lakhani leading AI product development, Pendo is poised to leverage its extensive usage data and customer insights to create solutions that meet the pressing needs of today’s product managers. The combination of Lakhani’s experience and Pendo’s data capabilities sets the stage for advancements in AI-driven product intelligence.