Pendo, the product intelligence company, has appointed Zain Lakhani as its first chief AI officer, marking a significant leadership move as the company accelerates the development of its agentic product suite. Lakhani, who previously founded and scaled AI engineering firm LightCI to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue in four years, brings direct experience building production-grade AI systems with some of the industry's most prominent technology organizations. The appointment signals Pendo's intent to reposition its platform for a software development landscape being fundamentally reshaped by AI.
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Pendo Adds First Chief AI Officer to Lead Agentic Product Expansion
The appointment of a dedicated chief AI officer reflects the scale of the transformation Pendo is navigating as AI fundamentally alters how software is built, shipped, and understood. Lakhani will report to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani and concentrate on accelerating the development and deployment of production-grade AI systems across architecture, product development, and strategic partnerships. The role is newly created, underscoring that Pendo views AI engineering leadership as a distinct organizational function rather than an extension of existing technical roles.
"The software development lifecycle is being totally disrupted," said Todd Olson, CEO and co-founder of Pendo. "Teams are shipping faster than ever with AI, and the tools we use to understand and improve software need to catch up. Zain is helping us rethink what observability looks like for AI builders — and rebuild the Pendo platform for companies making that shift."
Lakhani Brings Proven AI Engineering Credentials to the Role
Before joining Pendo, Lakhani founded LightCI, an AI engineering firm that grew to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue within four years. During that period, LightCI partnered with a number of the most consequential organizations in the AI space, including Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain. That trajectory gives Lakhani a depth of experience in building and scaling AI systems that is relatively rare at the executive level.
His relationship with Pendo predates the appointment. Through LightCI's partnership with Pendo beginning in November 2025, Lakhani contributed to the development of two notable products: Agent Analytics, an observability solution designed to measure the performance, usage, and business impact of AI agents; and Novus, a product agent that automatically detects and fixes usability issues as development teams ship.
"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," said Lakhani. "Pendo has more usage data than anyone, and customers who feel this pain acutely and want to solve it together. That's a rare combination. I'm excited to bring everything I've learned building with AI to help Pendo solve this problem."
Recent AI Milestones Reflect a Platform in Transition
The appointment of Lakhani is the latest in a series of moves that indicate Pendo is systematically repositioning itself as a platform built for the agentic AI era. The company was recently recognized on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list for 2026, a recognition linked specifically to the launch of Agent Analytics.
On the product and ecosystem front, Pendo has made its MCP Server generally available and secured placement in both Claude's Connectors Directory and ChatGPT's app directory, expanding the contexts in which Pendo's product intelligence can be accessed and applied. The company has also launched the Pendo Agent on the Google Marketplace and entered new partnerships with Fin, Planview, and Atlassian to provide product context directly to those organizations' agents.
Taken together, these developments reflect a deliberate strategy to embed Pendo's behavioral data and product intelligence capabilities into the broader AI agent ecosystem rather than operating as a standalone analytics platform.
The addition of Zain Lakhani as Pendo's first chief AI officer is a meaningful signal about where the product intelligence category is heading. As software development accelerates and AI agents take on a growing share of the work once done by product managers and engineers, the demand for observability, quality measurement, and usage intelligence built specifically for agentic workflows will only intensify. Pendo's move to build a dedicated AI engineering leadership function, backed by a proven operator in Lakhani, positions the company to compete for that emerging opportunity while the category is still being defined.
About Pendo
Pendo's mission is to elevate the world's experience with software. Built on trillions of behavioral data points, Pendo's product intelligence platform helps companies understand how people and agents use their products and ensure every digital experience delivers real value. Pendo is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, with 10 global offices.
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