Pendo, the product intelligence company, has appointed Zain Lakhani as its first chief AI officer, expanding the executive ranks to oversee AI engineering as the company scales its agentic AI product suite. Lakhani, who took the role on May 21, will report to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani and focus on accelerating development and deployment of production-grade AI systems across Pendo's architecture, product roadmap, and strategic partnerships.
The appointment underscores Pendo's strategic pivot toward AI-native product development workflows. CEO and co-founder Todd Olson said in a statement that "the software development lifecycle is being totally disrupted" and that "teams are shipping faster than ever with AI, and the tools we use to understand and improve software need to catch up." Lakhani will help Pendo "rethink what observability looks like for AI builders and rebuild the Pendo platform for companies making that shift," Olson added. The hiring comes as Pendo launched Agent Analytics, its first-of-its-kind observability platform for measuring AI agent performance, and expanded integrations across Claude, ChatGPT, and Google Marketplace. The company earned Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies designation in 2026 for the Agent Analytics launch.
Lakhani joins from LightCI, an AI engineering consulting firm he founded and scaled to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue in four years. LightCI worked with major technology companies including Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain, positioning Lakhani close to enterprise generative AI infrastructure buildout. Beginning in late 2025, LightCI partnered with Pendo to help develop Agent Analytics and Novus, an automated product agent designed to identify and fix usability issues. Lakhani holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Toronto and has held engineering leadership roles at EcoCart and Cloverly in climate technology, and as an engineering lead in fintech at Snapcommerce.
Pendo was founded in October 2013 by Olson and a team of product leaders and engineers from Red Hat, Cisco, and Google. The Raleigh, North Carolina-headquartered company provides product intelligence and analytics capabilities to understand user behavior and drive product adoption. It serves clients including Verizon, RE/MAX, LabCorp, OpenTable, Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Pendo has raised $356 million in venture capital and employs roughly 800 people across offices globally. The company has shifted in recent years from traditional product analytics toward enterprise intelligence that links usage data to operational and revenue outcomes.
The appointment signals a deepening industry trend of specialized AI governance roles at enterprise software companies as they move from generative AI experimentation into production-grade agentic deployment. The hire fits Pendo's stated direction of restructuring platform architecture around AI-native workflows and observability. By bringing Lakhani from a consulting firm that worked closely with the AI infrastructure firms shaping the buildout of enterprise AI, Pendo gains someone with firsthand experience in how these systems operate at scale. The company's partnership with LightCI and now Lakhani's internal appointment suggest it views deep AI systems expertise as critical to competing in markets where product teams are increasingly shipping code alongside autonomous agents rather than relying on dashboards and human-driven workflows.
