Pendo hires Zain Lakhani as its first chief AI officer

Pendo Names First Chief AI Officer to Build Tools for AI-Driven Product Teams

Pendo, a product intelligence company, appointed Zain Lakhani as its first chief AI officer on May 21. Lakhani will oversee AI engineering as the company scales its suite of agentic products.

Lakhani previously founded and scaled LightCI, an AI engineering firm, to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue in four years. The firm worked with Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain. Since November 2025, LightCI has partnered with Pendo on two products: Agent Analytics, an observability tool for measuring AI agent performance, and Novus, a product agent that automatically detects and fixes usability issues.

The Problem: Analytics Tools Can't Keep Pace

Product managers historically spent their days reviewing dashboards. Now they're shipping code directly using AI agents - and existing analytics platforms can't track the pace of that work.

"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," Lakhani said.

Todd Olson, Pendo's CEO and co-founder, framed the shift as a fundamental change in how software gets built. "The software development lifecycle is being totally disrupted," he said. "Teams are shipping faster than ever with AI, and the tools we use to understand and improve software need to catch up."

What Lakhani Will Lead

Lakhani reports to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani and will focus on accelerating development and deployment of production-grade AI systems across architecture, product development, and partnerships.

Pendo has released several AI products recently. The company launched an MCP Server and secured placement in Claude's Connectors Directory and ChatGPT's app directory. It also introduced the Pendo Agent on Google Marketplace and formed partnerships with Fin, Planview, and Atlassian to provide product context to their agents. Fast Company named Pendo one of its Most Innovative Companies for 2026.

For product professionals navigating this shift, understanding how to work with AI agents is becoming essential. Learn more about AI tools and practices for product managers or explore AI for product development more broadly.