You’re reading AI at the Top - Our new series on Sundays, where we share how leading companies and their executives use AI in business.
Imagine LinkedIn in 2011.
The company was experiencing fast user growth. But it struggled to keep up with demand. Engineers were burned out. Users were frustrated with service interruptions or broken features.
To solve this, a VP of engineering who only joined LinkedIn a few months ago decided to freeze the development of all new features.
He asked his engineers to only work on fixing LinkedIn’s architecture for the next two months.
It was a bold move considering the company had just gone public.
With this strategy, LinkedIn paid down a decade of technical debt. It increased system stability, made scaling easy, and shipped new features fast.
Meet Kevin Scott, The Engineer who saved LinkedIn (and so much more)
Here’s a quick timeline of Kevin Scott’s career in tech:
Started programming at 12.
He’s currently serving as Microsoft’s CTO.
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In today’s AI at the Top, we will share three perspectives from Kevin for AI-curious leaders like us.
“How has AI changed your learning capabilities?”
The rate of learning has increased, of course.
Kevin shares an anecdote of how his daughter was stuck with a tech problem. She was struggling with image segmentation approaches (let’s just say it’s a challenging technical solution), and he was in his car.
So he did what all of us would do - Ask AI.
“It took five minutes for Deep Research, and I was mindblown,” he said.
“If I had been given this task during my undergrad days, I’d have taken a week to research, write, and test the code.”
So yes, the rate of learning is super fast.
We have already noticed most of our readers use tools like NotebookLM to read summaries first to decide what resources need more attention. Some of us even upload research papers to LLMs and learn from conversations.
Kevin also uses AI to learn his hobbies fast.
“The coolest thing I have done is I got into making Japanese Tea Bowls in my ceramic studio …Copilot has been extremely helpful; it felt like I was having a real conversation with a person who knows Glaze Chemistry better than I do.”
“Where do you think the world is heading with AI agents?”
There’s definitely more than reasoning with AI. You want them to handle your tasks for you, and this is how Kevin thinks we will use agents in the future:
There will not be one agent for everything, but multiple specialised agents interacting with each other.
Now, most people handle a task and wait for the agent to finish it. In the future, async task handling will become the norm in non-technical households and companies.
We’ll eventually outsource a software developer’s work to an agent (at scale!). Something like, “Build this feature and get back to me with test readiness.” In short, agents will handle important, complex tasks for you over simpler, repeatable tasks.
Agents will have better memory.
It’s safe to assume more agents will visit websites and get tasks done for their owners, so we suspect the websites might start optimizing for agent traffic.
“What do you say to artists who say AI art is not art?”
By art, we mean being passionate about a skill so much so you care about its craftsmanship. It could be painting, trading, software engineering, etc.
We often hear writers say, “Writing with AI is not real writing.”
Passionate artists are often particular about how they approach their craft, the tools they use, etc.
But Kevin thinks we play the game of outcomes, especially at work.
“We need to differentiate between process-oriented and outcome-oriented tasks. If I need to write code, I can’t say I want to code manually because it delays our outcome as a team. But if I am making a ceramic cup, I enjoy my hands-on experience. It’s process-joy.”
You will have to find the fastest, most efficient way to the outcome.
“Take 3D printers, for example. I didn’t let myself be curious enough to try printing, but they turned extremely helpful when I did.”
We think that’s the whole point with AI and how fast it’s evolving.
Being curious enough to try.
🌟 Want to be featured in the next issue? Reach out with your best AI use case and we’ll spotlight it.
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PS. If you missed yesterday’s issue, you can find it here.