Where AI products go next: voice, agents, and self-driving software | Tara Sesha and Nan Yu (OpenAI)
OpenAI product leaders Tara Seshan and Nan Yu join Claire Vo at the Lenny and Friends Summit to discuss the realities of building AI products in a fast-moving landscape. They explore why shipping imperfect features is essential, how to structure single vs. multi-agent architectures, bridging the gap with research teams through evals, and why voice and self-driving interfaces will define the next wave of software.
- Working with AI research teams requires a different toolkit than standard engineering, focusing on user failure modes instead of sprint tickets. Read →
- Tara Seshan recommends that AI product teams plan only two to three months ahead instead of writing multi-year roadmaps. Read →
- Nan Yu argues that multi-agent systems fail when they exceed human cognitive limits, leading users to build a single "chief of staff" meta-agent to manage the sprawl. Read →
- Software onboarding faces a universal bottleneck: the empty input box, where users open ChatGPT or vertical tools and do not know what to ask. Read →
- An agent that completes 99% of a workflow and drops the final step creates more user frustration than a tool that never started. Read →