Pendo Appoints Zain Lakhani as First Chief AI Officer to Lead Agentic AI Product Development

Pendo, the product intelligence company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has announced that Zain Lakhani has joined the company as its first-ever Chief AI Officer — a newly created executive role that signals a major strategic pivot toward agentic AI product development. Lakhani will oversee AI engineering as Pendo scales its suite of agentic products, reporting directly to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani.

The appointment is not a hire from outside the orbit of the company. Lakhani comes to Pendo from LightCI, the AI engineering firm he founded and scaled to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue in just four years — a firm that had been partnering with Pendo since November 2025. Through that collaboration, he helped build two of Pendo's most talked-about new products: Agent Analytics and Novus. LightCI also built alongside companies including Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain, giving Lakhani a front-row seat to how the most ambitious AI teams in the world operate at production scale.

In his new role, Lakhani will focus on accelerating the development and deployment of production-grade AI systems across Pendo's architecture, product roadmap, and partnerships — with the goal of repositioning Pendo's platform for a world where product teams are no longer just analysts but active builders shipping code with the help of AI agents.

"The software development lifecycle is being totally disrupted. 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."

— Todd Olson, CEO & Co-Founder, Pendo

The Products at the Center of This Appointment

Lakhani's prior partnership with Pendo already bore fruit in the form of two distinct AI-native tools that are now core to the company's product strategy. Understanding these products is key to understanding why this appointment matters.

"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. 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."

— Zain Lakhani, Chief AI Officer, Pendo

Broader AI Momentum at Pendo

The Lakhani appointment is the latest in a string of AI-forward moves at Pendo. The company has made its MCP Server generally available — with inclusion in Claude's Connectors Directory and ChatGPT's app directory — and launched the Pendo Agent on the Google Marketplace. New partnerships with Fin, Planview, and Atlassian are also in place to provide product context directly to their respective AI agents. Together, these moves paint a picture of a company actively repositioning itself from a traditional product analytics tool to a foundational layer for AI-native software development workflows.

What makes this appointment particularly compelling is the precedent it sets for how enterprise software companies should think about AI leadership. Rather than grafting an AI executive onto an existing org chart, Pendo built a working partnership with Zain Lakhani first — generating real products, earning real trust, and then formalizing the relationship into a C-suite role. It is a playbook that prioritizes demonstrated output over pedigree, and it arrives at a moment when the gap between product analytics tools and the AI-driven development workflows they are meant to serve has never been wider.

To learn more about Pendo's product intelligence platform and its growing suite of agentic AI tools, visit Pendo's official website.