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Description
Deployed is the podcast for people building AI products.
With all the hype about AI over the past two years, it’s often been hard to discern what’s actually working. We started Deployed to share the real-world stories of the leaders, engineers, product & design teams, and data teams who are building and running great generative AI products for their customers.
In each episode we’ll dig into the journey to create these products, the impact they’re making for customers and the bottom line, and what it takes to make generative AI products successful. Our hope is to add a bit of signal in all the noise, and help you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to strategies and tactics that actually work in production.
We’d love to hear from you, please reach out to us at team@freeplay.ai.
You can also learn more about what we’re building at Freeplay here: freeplay.ai
21 Episodes
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Superhuman charges $30/month for email when Gmail is free. That's always forced them to maintain a different quality bar from most products, and it shapes everything about how they build AI features too. Loïc Houssier is CTO at Superhuman Mail, and one of the most fun and energized engineering leaders I've gotten to work with. In this conversation, he walks us through what quality really means when you're building a "luxury" software product - and how that mindset applies to AI. We dig into t...
On this episode of Deployed we talk with Lijuan Qin, Head of Product for Zoom AI, about how her team is moving beyond AI meeting transcriptions and note-taking to a mission of agents helping from "conversation to completion." That's how Lijuan describes her vision of the future for Zoom AI, where AI doesn't just summarize your meetings, it actually follows through on the work that comes after. Lijuan has a PhD in AI and spent 20 years at Microsoft working on NLP and video understanding befor...
Kevin Stanton has spent 13 years at Sprout Social, most recently running infrastructure for a platform that processes billions of social posts. When generative AI emerged, their team saw an opportunity to solve one of their hardest problems: helping customers make sense of massive amounts of unstructured social data. Now Kevin is building Trellis, Sprout's AI agent for social listening and competitive intelligence. In this conversation, he shares what it's looked like to shift an engineering ...
On this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Shuhao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of TinyFish, on launch day for Mino (mino.ai) - an enterprise web agent platform that handles reasoning, multi-step execution, and parallel browser sessions at scale. Shuhao shares his vision for the "operational web" where AI agents become the primary operators of the web, unlimited by human constraints. He shares a live demo and customer stories, like working with Google to connect tens of thousands of Japanese ...
On this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Ajit Varma, VP of Product at Mozilla Firefox, and former product leader at Google, Meta, Square, and WhatsApp. Ajit brings a unique perspective: while venture-backed AI browsers race to build what increasingly look like walled gardens, Mozilla has spent months quietly shipping privacy-first AI features that put user choice above everything else. It's a thoughtful conversation with candid insights into why Firefox offers multiple AI chat prov...
On this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Surojit Chatterjee, CEO and founder of Ema, and former VP of Product at Google and Chief Product Officer at Coinbase. Surojit brings a rare perspective: he started building enterprise AI agents in early 2023—well before "agentic AI" became a buzzword- and has spent two years getting them to production quality that companies like Hitachi actually trust. Surojit gives us refreshingly candid insights into why Ema calls their products "AI Emplo...
In this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Ryan Carson, Builder in Residence at Amp (Sourcegraph's coding agent) and founder of Treehouse, which taught over a million people to code. Ryan brings a rare dual perspective: he's both building his own company with AI tools and helping create enterprise-grade AI coding infrastructure. Ryan gives us refreshingly honest insights into the hyper-competitive coding agent landscape, why traditional evals don't work for open-ended coding tasks, and the...
On this episode of Deployed, we talk with Kelly Schaefer, a Product Director at Google Labs and who’s been recognized as one of the Top 100 Women in AI. Kelly has led a portfolio of experimental AI products like NotebookLM and the Jules coding agent. The Google Labs team helps turn DeepMind research into real products that can work at Google scale. She shares what actually works when shipping AI features, from how her teams use evals to drive product quality, to why speed matters more than pe...
On this episode of Deployed we talk with Kwindla Hultman-Kramer, co-founder of Daily (daily.co) and creator of Pipecat (pipecat.ai), the most widely used open source framework for voice agent orchestration. Kwin shares insights from building voice AI infrastructure since before it was cool, including why he thinks we've hit an inflection point now where voice agents are quickly moving from demos to real production deployments with real ROI. He breaks down the technical stack that actu...
On this episode we talk with Nathan Sobo, co-founder and CEO of Zed, the high-performance code editor that's reimagining how AI agents can improve developer workflows. Nathan shares lessons from building one of the most natural agentic coding experiences available, including why investing up front to automate the feedback loop to improve the quality of AI systems is worth it. He also shares some great product design insights that go beyond the code editor -- including how they were able...
On this episode we talk with Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction — a VC firm focused on early-stage AI investments. Sarah shares insights from her unique position at the intersection of AI research, startups, and enterprise adoption that are relevant to people building with AI. Topics like: How successful teams keep up with rapid changes in the AI landscape, how AI labs vs. enterprises approach problems differently, thoughts on why many AI initiatives struggle to move from prototype ...
On this episode we talk with Tyler Phillips, AI Product Lead at Apollo.io, about what it really takes to build successful AI products in sales. Tyler shares surprisingly candid insights about the "unsexy" but critical work that great AI PMs do - from spending hours evaluating AI outputs to building systematic quality frameworks. Learn why it can help for domain experts should write prompts instead of engineers, how Apollo measures AI quality across their products, and the practical strategies...
On this episode of Deployed: The AI Product Podcast, we sit down with Ben Kus, CTO of Box, to unpack how they built a secure, scalable AI platform within their enterprise content management system. Ben shares candid insights from Box's journey integrating AI capabilities while maintaining enterprise-grade security for sensitive customer data. Learn practical strategies for evaluating AI quality without accessing customer data, building internal platforms that engineering teams want to use, an...
In this episode, we sit down with Arya Asemanfar, Product and Engineering leader at Sierra, to explore the future of AI-powered enterprise agents. Arya breaks down how Sierra is transforming customer experiences by building agents that go beyond traditional chatbots—taking meaningful actions, embodying brand voice, and scaling reliably for unique business needs. Learn how Sierra approaches agent development with their innovative “Agent OS,” solves challenges like tool hallucination, and co-de...
In this episode of Deployed: The AI Product Podcast, we talk with Nick Francis, CEO and Co-founder, and Luis Morales, VP of Engineering at Help Scout, about their journey integrating AI into their established (13 years in market!) customer support platform. Nick and Luis share candid insights on: • How they shifted from skepticism about AI to embracing it as a tool for delighting customers • Their process for experimenting with AI features, from summarization to automated email drafts • Cha...
Kyle Nesbit, a longtime Googler and AI expert, joins us on Deployed to share lessons from his 17+ years at the forefront of distributed systems, machine learning, and AI-driven product innovation. Kyle has helped build foundational technologies like BigQuery and worked on early large language model (LLM) development at Google, giving him a unique perspective on how teams can successfully transition from traditional engineering to modern AI-focused workflows. In this episode, we explore:...
In this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Sara Beykpour, Co-founder and CEO of Particle, to discuss how they're using AI to transform how people consume news. Particle, which just launched last week, organizes news coverage across multiple sources into an easy-to-read, summarized, and personalized feed.What makes Particle particularly interesting is how seamlessly they've integrated AI into the core news reading experience. Rather than building yet another AI chatbot, they've created an...
Join us for an insightful conversation with Eliza Cabrera (Principal Product Manager) and Beau Lyddon (Principal Engineer) of Workday as they share their journey implementing generative AI at enterprise scale. As one of the first major enterprise software companies to roll out GenAI features, Workday offers valuable lessons for product and engineering teams navigating this technology. Learn how Workday approached everything from their first MVP features to scaling AI across their platform, in...
In episode #2 of Deployed: The AI Product Podcast, we meet with Mike Conover, co-founder & CEO of Brightwave to discuss the capabilities and challenges of building AI systems for financial research. Brightwave is an AI research assistant for financial professionals. Their product generates insightful and trustworthy financial analyses on demand. We get into the details of what it takes to make Brightwave work well, and lessons learned along the way including:Some of the limitations of LLM...
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