Zendesk’s CEO got real-life AI lessons from vibe coding an app with his son
Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier says he’s been telling his kids since 2023 that AI will be “bigger than the printing press, the internet, the Industrial Revolution,” and that they’d fall behind without it.
Key points
- Tom gained as much or more from the experience, saying it made him “a better leader for our R&D organization, our product, and AI.” The experience changed how Tom thinks about AI, from investing heavily in employees’ AI skills to focusing on how AI agents help people cut expenses, time, complexity, or solve other real-world problems.
- “We were vibe coding, and it was exciting because of the cool features that were coming out,” Tom said.
- Will suggested they work together on a predictive analytics app to help college athletics programs find players in the NCAA transfer portal before richer schools do.
Earlier this year, his son Will, a Boston College senior and basketball player who’s majoring in history with a minor in business, called his bluff.
Additional details
- “We wanted to create something that might be able to level that playing field a little bit,” Will told me during a recent interview alongside his dad.
- Will says he loved seeing his father work through problems in real time.
- In today’s CEO Daily: Zendesk’s CEO on using AI firsthand.
- “That recurring mistake has led me to think more deeply about how memory and skills affect our products and internal use of AI.” Also, keep hiring young employees; AI natives bring a fluency that creates an interesting dynamic alongside experienced workers.
- Speedy development created technical debt in areas from security to API protocols, and hours of debugging that reinforced that there are no shortcuts to making software seamless and secure.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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