I’ve been closely tracking how agentic AI reshapes frontline operations, and few case studies are as instructive as AITropos. Their north star is deceptively simple: take a food order over WhatsApp — correctly, every time, fast enough that customers can’t tell it’s not a person. That’s the challenge Santi Marchiori and Juan Haedo embraced, and it’s a masterclass in product strategy, conversation design, and systems engineering.
What they’ve built is an AI order-taking agent that handles the full flow — menu recommendations, modifiers, delivery zones, payment links, and status updates — entirely inside WhatsApp. Choosing the customer’s preferred channel wasn’t just a UX decision; it set the bar for speed, reliability, and trust. In hospitality, seconds matter. Latency becomes brand.
Their path to this solution reflects disciplined continuous discovery. They spent two years exploring hundreds of startup ideas before finding the niche of AI-powered order taking in hospitality, then iterated through three product forms — hardware for waiters, a waiter app, and finally a customer-facing WhatsApp agent — before landing on the right form factor. In my experience, this is what real product-market fit lessons look like: follow the problem, not the artifact.
Under the hood, the hardest problem is translating "non-deterministic human conversation" into structured "POS-compatible order data." To hit real-time response speed requirements, they chose a "tools-based architecture" over "MCP" or pipelines. That decision minimizes orchestration overhead and keeps the agent focused on the shortest path from intent to action — a pragmatic approach I recommend when SLAs are tight and context changes fast.
They also engineered for throughput and precision. A parallelized pipeline searches for multiple products simultaneously and pre-fetches product context before the agent even calls a tool. Complementing that, smaller, fast sub-agents assemble an "immediate system prompt" that injects relevant data into each turn without extra tool calls. Think of it as a retrieval-first pipeline designed to slash latency while preserving accuracy — a pattern every team building AI workflows should study.
Focus is evident in their KPIs. They identified order item identification accuracy as their single most important KPI. Picking one metric that truly governs customer trust is a hallmark of strong product management; it clarifies trade-offs in model selection, prompt engineering, and fallback behavior.
Quality assurance is equally rigorous. Before going live in any new venue, they test with thousands of agent-simulated customer conversations overnight. This approach de-risks deployment, surfaces edge cases early, and provides the data backbone for Agent Analytics and iteration. It’s a practical blueprint for teams operationalizing LLMs for product managers who need both scale and safety.
Operationally, the payoff shows up in onboarding. They reduced new customer onboarding from three months to a few weeks — and continue to shrink it as they build domain templates. Standardizing schemas, prompts, and flows for repeatable segments is exactly how you turn bespoke wins into a scalable go-to-market engine.
Stepping back, a few lessons stand out for product leaders building agentic AI in high-velocity environments: meet customers where they already are (WhatsApp), pick an architecture that serves your latency constraints (tools over complex workflows), pre-inject context to reduce tool calls, simulate at scale before launch, and anchor teams around one trust-defining KPI. Do these consistently, and you transform AI from a novelty into an always-on employee your customers actually prefer to use.
In my role leading product strategy at HighLevel, I’ve learned that AI search is one of the most overlooked growth levers in a modern product stack. When we treat every query as a moment to understand intent, reduce friction, and guide users to value, AI search stops being a utility and starts becoming a compounding engine for product-led growth.
"Turn AI search into a growth channel with AI visibility, sentiment analysis, revenue impact, and content recommendations in one place."
That single line has become a practical blueprint for how I operationalize AI Strategy: make what users ask visible, interpret how they feel, quantify what converts, and continually recommend better content. AI visibility tells me which intents we serve well (and where we fail). Sentiment analysis connects experience to emotion. Revenue impact closes the loop with attribution. Content recommendations ensure we don’t just diagnose gaps—we close them.
Under the hood, I anchor this on a retrieval-first pipeline that marries behavioral analytics with a unified analytics platform. This lets me trace the path from query to outcome: how users phrase needs, which results earn clicks, where drop-offs happen, and which experiences correlate with activation, retention, and expansion. With that signal, I can prioritize high-leverage content updates, tune relevance, and decide when agentic AI should step in with guided workflows rather than static results.
Measurement has to be rigorous. I rely on eval-driven development to benchmark intent coverage and answer quality, then confirm impact with A/B testing designed around a clear minimum detectable effect. We test ranking tweaks, prompt variants for LLMs for product managers, and new answer types (short snippets vs. deep dives) to isolate what actually moves activation and Net Recurring Revenue. If it doesn’t change behavior or dollars, it’s noise.
The operating model matters as much as the model weights. Cross-functional product trios pair continuous discovery and journey mapping with a lightweight content audit cadence. The CRO role partners with data science to align search KPIs to revenue goals, and solutions engineering ensures CRM integration and downstream systems reflect what users discover. This keeps the system honest: every improvement is traceable from insight to impact.
Finally, governance and scale are non‑negotiable. Privacy-by-design, clear data governance, and observability protect trust while feature flags and CI/CD let us iterate safely. When the fundamentals are strong, we can confidently expand into richer experiences—like proactive recommendations, in-app guides, and voice AI agent handoffs—without sacrificing reliability or compliance.
If your AI search still feels like a black box, it’s time to turn it into a transparent, revenue-linked growth channel. Make the work visible, measure what matters, and let sentiment and behavior guide the roadmap. The payoff is real: better answers, faster activation, and a content system that learns—and sells—every day.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
I created this practical guide to help product managers cut through the hype and apply AI where it genuinely moves the needle—faster discovery, clearer strategy, sharper execution, and measurable outcomes.
A practical guide to AI tools for product managers: tested picks, what each tool is best for, copy-paste prompts, workflows, and screenshot checklists.
Leading product management at HighLevel, I’ve pressure-tested dozens of gen AI solutions across product discovery, roadmap planning, delivery, and go-to-market. In this guide, I map an AI product toolbox to core PM jobs-to-be-done so you can move from experimentation to repeatable impact with confidence.
Expect clear recommendations on where each tool excels—LLMs for product managers, research synthesis for customer interviews, behavioral analytics for opportunity sizing, and lightweight automation for in-app guides and product tours. I connect these tools to proven practices like continuous discovery, outcomes vs output OKRs, and product roadmapping and sprint planning so you can operationalize AI inside your existing workflows.
I also share the evaluation criteria I use before rollout—AI Strategy alignment, data governance and privacy-by-design, AI risk management, observability, and total cost of ownership. This eval-driven development approach helps teams avoid technology FOMO while creating defensible, trustworthy workflows that scale.
To accelerate adoption, I’ve included copy-paste prompts (including prompt engineering patterns for both chat and voice), retrieval-first pipeline blueprints to ground your models in product docs and decision logs, and conversation design tips for support and success use cases. You’ll see step-by-step AI workflows that tie directly to journey mapping, opportunity solution trees, and Kano Model trade-offs.
Every workflow comes with screenshot checklists you can use for onboarding or stakeholder management, making it easy to align ICs and leaders on the same operating picture. Whether you’re optimizing A/B testing, retention analysis, or QBRs vs OKRs, these checklists turn good intentions into repeatable rituals.
Use this guide as your field companion to ship faster with higher confidence—reducing cycle time, improving signal in discovery, and building momentum for product-led growth. If you’re ready to translate generative AI into reliable PM leverage, start with the workflows, adapt the prompts, and make them your own.
Over the past quarter, I’ve been obsessed with a simple question: how do real people actually prompt AI agents when the stakes are high and the clock is ticking? We analyzed 27K sessions with Amplitude's Global Agent using our Agent Analytics tool. Here's what we found out about how real users are prompting our agent. That single line belies months of careful instrumenting, qualitative review, and product debates—and it forever changed how I design agent experiences.
The clearest pattern I saw: users don’t craft “perfect” prompts—they co-create with the agent. Most sessions began with a broad intent, then tightened through rapid, iterative turns. The winning structure emerged as context, command, and constraints. When our agent acknowledged context first, clarified the command, and reflected constraints back, users responded with noticeably more confidence. It reinforced what great prompt engineering already teaches, but grounded in lived behavior across thousands of journeys.
Trust was the next breakthrough. People wanted transparency on capabilities, a concise first answer, and an easy path to deeper detail and sources. They frequently asked the agent to show its work, summarize trade-offs, or restate assumptions in plain language. Instrumenting observability into the agent’s reasoning artifacts—without overwhelming the user—proved foundational for building credibility session by session.
On task complexity, users fared best when the agent orchestrated a few small, verifiable steps rather than one heroic leap. Retrieval-first pipeline patterns consistently reduced confusion and rework, especially when paired with strong context window management. The more the agent proactively chunked the problem, validated intermediate outputs, and offered next-best actions, the smoother the journey—and the more reusable the prompts became.
UX nudges mattered as much as model quality. Inline examples (“Try this”), one-click refinements (“Shorter,” “Add a table,” “Cite sources”), and lightweight guardrails kept momentum high without boxing users in. When the agent made uncertainty explicit and offered safe fallbacks, abandonment dropped and users explored more ambitiously. The experience felt less like “querying a model” and more like collaborating with a capable teammate.
From a product management lens, these insights shape how I prioritize agentic AI. I’m doubling down on: scaffolded prompts that lead with context and constraints; transparent citations and assumptions; multi-step plans that the user can edit; and evaluation loops that A/B test prompt templates, tool strategies, and response formats. I’m also investing in analytics that connect session patterns to activation, speed-to-value, and retention so we can run eval-driven development, not opinion-driven debates.
If you’re building agents into a core product workflow, start by designing for iterative co-creation, not one-shot brilliance. Offer progressive disclosure, keep the first answer tight, and make verification effortless. Shape the model with retrieval-first strategies, manage your context window like a scarce resource, and treat observability as a feature, not a debug tool. Most of all, let real usage guide your roadmap—these 27K sessions reminded me that the best agent UX is learned alongside our users, not imagined in isolation.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.
I’ve learned that the smallest slice of your support queue often dictates the majority of your operating cost, customer memory, and automation ceiling. In product reviews and CX ops deep-dives, I see the same pattern: the “easy” tickets pad your resolution counts, but the complex, multi-step queries quietly own your handle time and your brand trust. If you care about compounding impact, your customer support AI strategy has to target that hardest percentage first.
Complex queries are a small percentage of your queue, but they consume a disproportionate share of your team’s time.
Take a typical queue: password resets outnumber refund disputes ten to one, but a reset takes five minutes and a dispute takes thirty. The “rare” query accounts for over a third of total handling time. The same pattern holds for account investigations, subscription changes, and billing disputes.
How you handle complex queries is also what customers actually remember about their support experience. When someone is dealing with a damaged order or a billing dispute, the stakes are higher, and a fast, good resolution is what separates a forgettable interaction from one that builds lasting trust.
Most AI Agents automate the easy, informational queries well. The question for your automation rate is whether they can handle the hard ones. That’s where agentic AI and robust AI workflows make or break your outcomes.
We’ve gotten really good at informational queries – the hard part is what comes next. I’ve seen teams invest deeply here, and for good reason: it lifts containment quickly and cheaply. But to break through the plateau, you have to execute actions across systems, not just answer with text.
We’ve invested deeply in informational Q&A. We built Apex, a specialized customer service model trained on billions of support interactions, as Fin’s core answering engine. Beneath that sits a custom retrieval model, a purpose-built reranker, and a unified RAG pipeline, all trained specifically for customer service. Fin resolves issues at a higher rate than general-purpose frontier models, with fewer hallucinations and at lower cost.
But informational Q&A only covers queries where text is the answer. Most Agents can handle that. Far fewer let you configure complex, multi-step actions without a forward-deployed engineer setting it up for you, which creates a gap.
Every query your team handles falls into one of three categories:
Informational: “Can you ship transatlantic by priority next day?” Answered with text from your knowledge base.
Personalized: “Where is my order?” Requires data unique to that user.
Action-led: “My order arrived damaged, I need a refund.” Requires doing something: checking a return window, cross-referencing transaction data, making a judgment call – reading from multiple systems and acting across them.
From Jan to Apr 2026, the trend moves steadily upward, pausing briefly before a sharp late surge. A clear snapshot of momentum for customer service KPIs, finance results, and the impact of new procedures.
These complex queries, the ones that require multi-step processes across systems, aren’t edge cases; they’re the reason your support team exists. This is the gap Fin Procedures was built to close.
It works in practice, and the trajectory matters for product strategy and ops planning.
Procedures is live, it’s scaling, and the results are clear. Since launching in managed availability, Procedures has handled over 1.5 million conversations, and volume is doubling month over month across hundreds of apps in fintech, e-commerce, gaming, healthcare, and SaaS.
When customers hit complex, multi-step queries, the experience is dramatically better when Fin can do the work end-to-end. We tested this with a randomized 5% holdout – conversations where Procedures would normally run, but didn’t. CSAT was 28.93% higher when Procedures ran, a statistically significant result.
A product, not a services engagement. I’ve sat through too many “automation” projects that were really solutions engineering gigs: workshops, custom scripts, then a queue of change requests when policies shift. It’s fragile and slow.
The B2B AI industry has a consultingware problem. It’s not databases being forked anymore, it’s prompts. The economics of maintaining bespoke setups per customer don’t work. Either the application falls behind new models, or the vendor changes the model and quality degrades invisibly.
In my view, an agentic AI platform should be a product your team owns end to end: a natural language editor – literally paste your existing SOPs – branching logic, data connectors, and AI-powered simulations for testing. Your CX ops team configures this, iterates on it, owns it. If you need help, a forward-deployed team can assist, but they’re optional, not a dependency. You always have control.
And because it’s a unified product, improvement compounds. When the vendor optimizes a prompt, every customer’s Procedures get better. When they upgrade the model, they can A/B test across the entire customer base and know it’s better before rolling out. You can’t do that when every customer has a bespoke prompt. The consulting model isn’t just expensive, it’s structurally unable to compound.
Today, Fin Procedures is available to every Intercom customer – no waitlist or managed rollout, ready for all 8,000+ customers.
We’re iterating fast based on real customer feedback. Here’s what’s landed since the last major update, and why it matters for reliability and governance:
AI-powered Procedure review: Flags broken logic, missing references, and unreachable conditions before you deploy.
Kick off your journey with the #1 Agent—an AI partner designed to turn resolutions into real outcomes. Tap “Start a free trial” to explore faster, smarter customer service and see how Fin delivers value from day one.
Procedure failure reporting: A new reporting dimension that lets you drill into conversations where Procedures failed, so you can diagnose and fix.
Version history with rollback: Track every change, compare versions, roll back if needed.
Data connector health monitoring: See at a glance if your integrations are healthy, degraded, or failing.
Optional data connector parameters: Fin only asks customers for information when it’s actually needed, instead of prompting for every field.
Email Simulation support: Test how your Procedures behave across chat and email before going live.
Agent in the Loop (Beta) unlocks the next tranche of automation. Even with Procedures, two things hold teams back from automating their most complex queries: missing integrations and policies that require a human sign-off on sensitive decisions.
“Agent in the Loop” is built for both. Need Fin to check your internal admin tools but haven’t built a data connector yet? Put a human checkpoint at that step. Fin handles the conversation, gathers context, and pauses, surfacing a structured summary for a human agent to verify or act, then resumes. You get automation on the 80% that doesn’t need the integration.
For compliance – identity verification, high-value refunds – Fin does the legwork, a human makes the final call and then hands it back to Fin. This works natively in the Intercom Inbox and via Slack. Some competitors don’t have an inbox-native variant at all, meaning humans need to leave their primary workspace to review AI actions.
Procedures are also built to let you collaborate with all your teammates – both human agents and AI Agents. Fin can work with them directly inside a Procedure, using APIs and webhooks to loop in another teammate mid-flow, hand off context, and pick back up once they’re done.
Making it easier, faster. Procedures is already self-serve, but the next step is making Procedure creation, testing, and maintenance significantly more streamlined and easy to do, with less manual editing and more AI-assisted building and debugging. There’s a lot coming in this space over the next few months – and it aligns perfectly with a retrieval-first pipeline and stronger governance at scale.
The hardest percentages matter the most. The biggest unlock for your automation rate won’t be answering more FAQs, it will be handling the complex, multi-step queries that consume your team’s time and define what customers remember about their experience with you.
That means working with an Agent that goes beyond answering questions and executes processes. A product your team owns and configures, not a service you buy and hope gets maintained. And a platform where every improvement compounds across every customer. That’s Procedures. Available now, for everyone.
I set out to solve a deceptively simple problem: help our teams ask product questions in plain English and get trustworthy, analysis-grade answers—fast. That required more than a powerful model; it demanded agents that genuinely understand the language of product analytics, from behavioral analytics nuances to the messy reality of event taxonomies, funnels, and cohorts. In this post, I share how we engineered agentic AI that speaks our domain fluently and turns questions into decisions.
The core challenge wasn’t data volume or dashboard sprawl; it was semantics. Different teams said “activation,” “onboarding,” or “first value” and meant overlapping but distinct things. Our PMs, analysts, and engineers navigated a maze of synonyms across Amplitude analytics, Pendo, and our unified analytics platform. Generic LLMs stumbled on these nuances, so we built a shared ontology—driver trees anchored to a clear North Star—with canonical definitions for activation, retention, and conversion, plus consistent event naming and cohort logic.
We started with a rigorous metric catalog: every KPI linked to its drivers, exact formulas, cohorts, and time windows; every event mapped to a product taxonomy; every dashboard and SQL snippet versioned with ownership and lineage. That catalog became the ground truth for agents. We embedded data governance and privacy-by-design from the start—permissioning for fields and queries, PII redaction, and scoped access that reflected how product teams actually work.
Next, we built a retrieval-first pipeline to ground the agents in our corpus before generation. We indexed metric definitions, dashboards, experiment readouts, runbooks, and high-signal Slack threads so the agent could cite relevant artifacts, not just predict plausible text. With careful context window management and prompt engineering, the agent retrieves definitions and prior analyses, then plans multi-step actions: run a query, compare cohorts, check “minimum detectable effect (MDE)” for an A/B test, and summarize findings with references.
Architecturally, we treated this as “Agent Analytics”: an orchestrator that selects tools based on intent—querying Amplitude analytics or Pendo for behavioral paths and funnels, hitting our warehouse for cohort tables, or pulling experiment metadata and anomaly detection alerts. Tool use is permission-aware, auditable, and designed to fail safe. The agent’s outputs include citations back to the exact definitions, dashboards, and SQL used, so reviewers can validate and iterate.
Quality came from eval-driven development, not intuition. We built a gold set of representative product questions (activation inflections, retention analysis by segment, funnel drop-offs after feature launches) and scored the agent on faithfulness to definitions, numerical accuracy, latency, and actionability. We incorporated regression checks to catch drifts after schema changes, and we tuned prompts to reduce overconfident answers and push for clarifying questions when context was missing.
Safety and reliability were non-negotiable. We layered AI risk management with role-based access, guardrails that block destructive queries, and risk scoring for unfamiliar joins or sudden spikes in metric deltas. The agent logs every step—what it retrieved, which tools it called, and why—so analysts can replay and refine the chain of thought with transparent provenance.
The payoff: product teams now self-serve nuanced questions in minutes instead of days, and our analysts spend more time on discovery than report wrangling. Retention analysis improved as the agent standardized cohort logic; conversion investigations accelerated thanks to consistent funnel definitions; and cross-functional decisions aligned around the same driver trees and shared language. Most importantly, the agent turned ambiguous asks into structured analyses that stand up to scrutiny.
For fellow product leaders, my lesson is simple: start with semantics, not models. A crisp ontology, disciplined taxonomy, and clear ownership will outperform a flashy stack riddled with ambiguity. Avoid technology FOMO; favor retrieval-first grounding, small sharp tools, and continuous discovery with your product trios. When your organization speaks a common analytics language, agents can finally think with you, not just for you.
Next, we’re extending the agent’s planning skills to recommend experiment designs, estimate power and “minimum detectable effect (MDE),” and propose driver-tree-informed bet sizing. We’re also tightening feedback loops so every accepted answer, edit, or override strengthens the retrieval corpus and evaluations. The vision: a calm, reliable layer that makes rigorous product analytics feel conversational—and helps teams move from questions to confident action.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
I set out to solve a deceptively simple problem: help our teams ask product questions in plain English and get trustworthy, analysis-grade answers—fast. That required more than a powerful model; it demanded agents that genuinely understand the language of product analytics, from behavioral analytics nuances to the messy reality of event taxonomies, funnels, and cohorts. In this post, I share how we engineered agentic AI that speaks our domain fluently and turns questions into decisions.
The core challenge wasn’t data volume or dashboard sprawl; it was semantics. Different teams said “activation,” “onboarding,” or “first value” and meant overlapping but distinct things. Our PMs, analysts, and engineers navigated a maze of synonyms across Amplitude analytics, Pendo, and our unified analytics platform. Generic LLMs stumbled on these nuances, so we built a shared ontology—driver trees anchored to a clear North Star—with canonical definitions for activation, retention, and conversion, plus consistent event naming and cohort logic.
We started with a rigorous metric catalog: every KPI linked to its drivers, exact formulas, cohorts, and time windows; every event mapped to a product taxonomy; every dashboard and SQL snippet versioned with ownership and lineage. That catalog became the ground truth for agents. We embedded data governance and privacy-by-design from the start—permissioning for fields and queries, PII redaction, and scoped access that reflected how product teams actually work.
Next, we built a retrieval-first pipeline to ground the agents in our corpus before generation. We indexed metric definitions, dashboards, experiment readouts, runbooks, and high-signal Slack threads so the agent could cite relevant artifacts, not just predict plausible text. With careful context window management and prompt engineering, the agent retrieves definitions and prior analyses, then plans multi-step actions: run a query, compare cohorts, check “minimum detectable effect (MDE)” for an A/B test, and summarize findings with references.
Architecturally, we treated this as “Agent Analytics”: an orchestrator that selects tools based on intent—querying Amplitude analytics or Pendo for behavioral paths and funnels, hitting our warehouse for cohort tables, or pulling experiment metadata and anomaly detection alerts. Tool use is permission-aware, auditable, and designed to fail safe. The agent’s outputs include citations back to the exact definitions, dashboards, and SQL used, so reviewers can validate and iterate.
Quality came from eval-driven development, not intuition. We built a gold set of representative product questions (activation inflections, retention analysis by segment, funnel drop-offs after feature launches) and scored the agent on faithfulness to definitions, numerical accuracy, latency, and actionability. We incorporated regression checks to catch drifts after schema changes, and we tuned prompts to reduce overconfident answers and push for clarifying questions when context was missing.
Safety and reliability were non-negotiable. We layered AI risk management with role-based access, guardrails that block destructive queries, and risk scoring for unfamiliar joins or sudden spikes in metric deltas. The agent logs every step—what it retrieved, which tools it called, and why—so analysts can replay and refine the chain of thought with transparent provenance.
The payoff: product teams now self-serve nuanced questions in minutes instead of days, and our analysts spend more time on discovery than report wrangling. Retention analysis improved as the agent standardized cohort logic; conversion investigations accelerated thanks to consistent funnel definitions; and cross-functional decisions aligned around the same driver trees and shared language. Most importantly, the agent turned ambiguous asks into structured analyses that stand up to scrutiny.
For fellow product leaders, my lesson is simple: start with semantics, not models. A crisp ontology, disciplined taxonomy, and clear ownership will outperform a flashy stack riddled with ambiguity. Avoid technology FOMO; favor retrieval-first grounding, small sharp tools, and continuous discovery with your product trios. When your organization speaks a common analytics language, agents can finally think with you, not just for you.
Next, we’re extending the agent’s planning skills to recommend experiment designs, estimate power and “minimum detectable effect (MDE),” and propose driver-tree-informed bet sizing. We’re also tightening feedback loops so every accepted answer, edit, or override strengthens the retrieval corpus and evaluations. The vision: a calm, reliable layer that makes rigorous product analytics feel conversational—and helps teams move from questions to confident action.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.
Disruption is the only sustainable strategy in product. When a platform meaningfully changes how we build and operate, I pay attention—not just as a product leader, but as someone accountable for turning AI Strategy into durable competitive differentiation. That’s why the launch of the Fin API platform stands out: it’s a concrete step toward agentic AI at enterprise scale.
Today, I’m diving into what this launch includes, why it matters for product strategy, and how I’d navigate the build vs buy decision in this new landscape. My goal is to translate the announcement into actionable guidance for product teams, CX leaders, and forward-deployed engineers who are building the next generation of customer support and product-led experiences.
Fin is a customer agent platform that at present resolves over 2M customer issues a week, growing at a rapid exponential pace. It’s relied on by the best brands, large and small, in every vertical you can imagine. From Atlassian and Riot Games, to smaller hot upstarts like Mercury and Polymarket. It runs on a family of models trained by its AI group. Last week, they announced Apex, which is the world’s first specialized customer service LLM. In production tests over the last 6 months, it beat every single frontier model, including those from Anthropic and OpenAI, on resolution rate, latency, hallucination rate, and cost.
With this launch, teams can access the platform’s core capabilities and underlying models directly via API, with contracts starting at $250k per year, and usage rates that are by far the cheapest in the industry for each of the model’s subcategories. For leaders evaluating total cost of ownership, this is a meaningful data point: it shifts the economics of scaled automation from experimental to operational.
Why now? Because builders want options. I hear from teams daily that want to design their own agents, tune prompts and policies, and integrate with bespoke CRMs, data lakes, and product surfaces. The Fin announcement meets that demand with three clear build-paths, each mapping to a different operating model and maturity stage.
First, for the vast majority of companies, the Fin Agent Platform is the pragmatic starting point. Fin reports ~8k companies on it today. It addresses 99% of customer needs out of the box—without exhausting consulting engagements—while delivering top-tier resolution rates. If your priority is time-to-value, governance, and platform scalability, this route de-risks implementation and accelerates outcomes.
Second, for teams that need custom surfaces or channels, the Fin Agent API lets you present Fin in unique contexts. You get the Fin platform’s orchestration and controls, but you’re free to bypass the default messenger, email, voice, or any prebuilt channel and embed the agent natively in your product. I see this as the sweet spot for product-led growth motions where conversation design and UX writing are strategic levers.
Third, for companies building hyper-specific agents—think service plus in-product actions—the new API access to Apex and the broader collection of models is the obvious move. Unlike generalized models, these are purpose-trained for customer service scenarios and operational policies. If you have strong in-house solutions engineering, a retrieval-first pipeline, and eval-driven development in place, this path maximizes control without reinventing the model layer.
This also opens the door for vertical specialists. Fin-like businesses focused on deep domains can emerge quickly—Fin for dentists? Why not? Fin for car dealerships? Sure. I expect startups and modern CX providers (including players like Decagon and Sierra) to carve out niches where domain data, workflows, and compliance are the real moats. That’s where differentiated AI beats generic capability.
There’s a defensive reason to pay attention here. The software landscape is shifting fast: the moat is no longer feature parity—it’s the quality of your agents and the data flywheels powering them. Building software is simply less hard now, and I’ve watched engineering teams more than double measurable productivity as they adopt AI-assisted development. The implication is clear: the interface-and-features era is giving way to an agents-and-outcomes era.
Serious software companies must evolve from being a features company to an agents company—and build those agents on differentiated AI. More value will accrue at the model and orchestration layers, where safety, latency, cost, and resolution quality are won. That puts a premium on prompt engineering discipline, policy routing, continuous discovery of edge cases, and rigorous offline/online evals to keep hallucination rates low while maintaining speed.
How would I choose among the three build-paths? If you’re early or resource-constrained, start with the Fin Agent Platform to validate outcomes and align stakeholders. If you need branded experiences and tighter product integration, use the Fin Agent API to control surfaces without owning the heavy lifting. If you have strong ML ops and a mature customer support ai strategy, go model-level with Apex and companions, layering in your own guardrails, context window management, and test harnesses. In each case, balance velocity, control, and risk—your build vs buy decision should be grounded in clear metrics and an explicit product strategy.
Where does this lead? We’ll see more companies expose specialized model families with clearer economics and stronger governance. For now, I’m excited to see what teams build with the Fin API platform—and how they turn agentic AI into measurable improvements in resolution rate, CSAT, cost-to-serve, and ultimately, customer loyalty.
Every week, I coach product and documentation teams on a simple truth I keep pinned above my desk: "AI is reading your documentation! Learn tips from the Amplitude docs team about how to structure your documentation for both human and AI audiences." That line captures the shift we’re all living through—our docs must now serve customers, support engineers, and increasingly, LLMs powering chat, search, and in‑product help.
My AI strategy for documentation starts with intent. I map the core questions users ask at activation, onboarding, escalation, and renewal, then shape information architecture to reduce ambiguity. This helps humans find answers faster and helps LLMs retrieve the right chunks with higher precision—a win for UX writing, product-led growth, and support deflection.
Structure beats style when AI is in the loop. I rely on semantic headings (H1–H3), consistent slugs, stable anchors, and one‑topic pages that can stand alone. Short paragraphs, scannable summaries, and canonical references reduce duplication and improve retrieval quality. Treat docs-as-code with CI/CD so changes are reviewed, versioned, and shipped reliably—documentation deserves the same rigor as product releases.
Chunking matters for LLMs. I design content for context window management: one concept per section, tight procedures with numbered steps, and FAQs that mirror real queries. Glossaries define canonical terms and accepted synonyms so retrieval-first pipelines match user language without fragmenting meaning. Error messages and parameter names appear verbatim to strengthen search and grounding.
Metadata is a multiplier. I add clear titles, descriptions, last‑updated dates, product area tags, and audience labels (admin, developer, analyst) to boost SEO and machine readability. Stable IDs for components, examples, and API objects improve deep linking and evaluation. Where appropriate, I include structured examples that align with prompt engineering best practices so AI assistants can extract inputs, outputs, and constraints cleanly.
Quality is measured, not hoped for. I pair content audit checklists with analytics to see what’s searched, where users pogo‑stick, and which articles drive successful task completion. Tools like Amplitude analytics reveal gaps and dead‑ends, while lightweight evals (answer accuracy, grounding rate, latency) ensure LLMs retrieve the right doc chunks at the right time.
Consistency is a feature. I standardize terminology across UI, API, and docs, and I avoid synonym sprawl that confuses both readers and LLMs. Page intros state the job-to-be-done; conclusions link to adjacent tasks; and deprecation notes are explicit with forward paths. This coherence lowers cognitive load and improves both RAG performance and human trust.
Governance keeps it scalable. I assign owners per section, define SLAs for updates, and automate checks for broken links, orphaned pages, and outdated screenshots. Redirect rules avoid 404s, and version banners prevent LLMs from mixing deprecated guidance into current answers—small details that cumulatively protect customer experience.
If you’re just getting started, begin with three moves: clarify intents, restructure pages into atomic, linkable units, and add metadata that reflects how customers actually search. From there, tighten your retrieval-first pipeline and run regular evals. The payoff is durable: faster time to value for users, lower support load, and AI assistants that answer accurately, confidently, and consistently.
Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.
What if AI could help reduce the 10-plus years it takes to get a new drug to market? That question has shaped much of my own product strategy thinking, and it’s exactly why I was drawn to Medable’s bold move with Agent Studio. It’s a rare look inside an enterprise AI platform built for one of the most regulated industries in the world—and a team that’s still figuring it out in real time.
In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with four members of the Medable team: Luke Bates (Product Leader, Agent Studio), Jen Brown (Product Manager), Matt Schoolfield (Product Designer), and Fiachra Matthews (Principal Architect). Listening through a product management lens, I focused on how their choices reflect a modern agentic AI strategy that balances speed, safety, and scale.
Medable does something uniquely hard: enabling global clinical trials across 100+ languages and accelerating drug-to-market timelines. That scope demands more than clever prompts—it requires a durable platform approach. Their answer is Agent Studio, a no-code/low-code platform for configuring and deploying agents across the clinical trial lifecycle.
What impressed me most was how clearly the platform’s primitives map to repeatable value: models, skills, knowledge bases, MCP connectors, versioning, and trigger types. In my experience, platforms win when these building blocks are composable, governed, and observable—exactly the direction Medable is taking.
You’ll also hear about the two agents they’ve built on top of it: an ETMF agent that automates document classification across 80,000-plus documents per year, and a CRA agent that monitors patient safety and data quality across 13 different clinical systems. For a domain where errors carry real human consequences, this is the right mix of automation and oversight.
Under the hood, their architecture choices echo what I’ve seen work in other high-stakes environments. They walk through RAG approaches at scale: embeddings vs. markdown hierarchies vs. just-in-time MCP retrieval, and explain Why they built custom MCPs with an authentication and credentialing wrapper. They also detail Context window management with sub-agents and automatic tool filtering—critical to keep agents focused and reliable as complexity grows.
Data alignment is often the unsung hero of agent reliability. I appreciated how they described How they built a unified ontology layer to map terminology across 13 different clinical data systems. Equally important, they show their paper trail: How they document agent intent → specification → test evidence to satisfy regulatory bodies. In a GXP context, this kind of lineage isn’t “nice to have”—it’s the price of admission.
Discover how Medable's Agent Studio reimagines clinical operations, shrinking drug-to-market timelines from a decade to a year with no-code agents, automated eTMF document classification, unified data monitoring, and human-in-the-loop validation.
Strategically, I love that Medable chose a platform approach to agents instead of one-off builds. They outline Three deployment models: Medable-built products, services-led custom builds, and self-serve platform access. This mirrors a healthy platform business model: prove value with first-party solutions, extend via services for complex needs, and unlock scale with self-serve—while keeping governance centralized.
Reliability is a theme throughout. They describe Evaluation design in a GXP-regulated environment: golden datasets, production monitoring, and the challenge of human feedback as ground truth. We also get a concrete picture of what human-in-the-loop really looks like when clinical decisions are on the line—tight feedback cycles, auditable interventions, and clear escalation paths.
Looking forward, they don’t shy away from ambition. The "full self-driving" vision for clinical trials and what it would take to get there is both provocative and grounded. My read: the path runs through stronger domain ontologies, standardized interfaces (MCP done right), eval-driven development, and relentless simplification of agent skills.
If you’re a product leader building in regulated spaces, this discussion is a masterclass in balancing innovation with compliance. The takeaways map cleanly to AI Strategy: define platform primitives, invest in retrieval-first pipeline patterns, design for context window management, lean into eval-driven development, and operationalize regulatory compliance from day one.
To dive deeper, listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and explore Medable’s broader platform work at medable.com. I left both inspired and practically equipped—an uncommon combo in today’s AI noise.
In my role leading product teams at HighLevel, I’m often asked to explain what’s really happening behind the scenes of today’s AI products. The short answer is that modern systems are built on "Agentic Architecture: How Modern AI Systems Actually Work"—not just a single model, but a coordinated loop of planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation. Once you see that pattern, the design decisions snap into focus and the roadmap becomes far easier to prioritize.
At its core, agentic AI treats the model as a reasoning engine embedded within an AI workflow. The agent interprets intent, plans steps, calls the right tools and APIs, grounds itself in trusted data, and then evaluates outcomes before deciding to continue or stop. This loop creates reliability, reduces hallucinations, and enables the system to operate in real-world, multi-step scenarios.
Here’s the practical lifecycle I rely on. A user provides intent (a goal or request). We run a retrieval-first pipeline to ground the model in accurate, current data. Prompt engineering structures the task and primes the agent with constraints and success criteria while managing context window management. The agent generates a plan, executes steps by calling tools or services, evaluates intermediate results, reflects or revises as needed, and only then returns a final answer with clear citations or evidence.
For more complex work, I orchestrate multiple specialized agents—commonly a planner, a solver, and a critic—coordinated by a lightweight controller. This multi-agent pattern reduces single-agent blind spots, encourages self-checking, and mirrors how empowered product teams collaborate. Whether it’s conversation design for support flows or a voice AI agent driving hands-free tasks, orchestration is the difference between a clever demo and a dependable product.
Memory is the second pillar. Short-term working context sits in the prompt, while long-term memory lives in vector stores or databases to track past interactions, preferences, and outcomes. Retrieval augments the model with the right facts at the right time, and tight context window management ensures the agent stays focused on signal, not noise. The result is faster responses, lower costs, and far better accuracy.
Reliability is earned through eval-driven development and robust AI risk management. I define offline and online evaluations, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints before scaling traffic. These evaluations become living, automated tests that protect against regressions as prompts, models, and tools evolve. The payoff is real: fewer escalations, higher trust, and measurable improvements to quality over time.
From a product strategy perspective, I resist over-engineering. Start with a simple retrieval-first pipeline and a single agent; prove value; then layer in multi-agent orchestration only where it moves key metrics. Instrument everything—latency, cost, grounding coverage, and outcome quality—and build Agent Analytics dashboards so teams can diagnose issues and iterate with confidence.
If you’re looking for a practical playbook, here’s mine: clarify the user intent and success criteria; design the tools the agent can call; ground with authoritative data; write prompts that constrain scope and define termination conditions; add reflection and automated evaluations; and ship behind feature flags for safe, staged rollout. Each step compounds reliability without killing velocity.
The diagram and the video above bring these patterns to life. If you watch closely, you’ll see the same loop—plan, retrieve, act, evaluate—show up in every effective implementation, regardless of domain. That repetition isn’t accidental; it’s the backbone of agentic architecture and a blueprint you can adapt to your own stack.
Ultimately, what matters is outcomes. When we build around agentic AI, we create systems that are explainable to stakeholders, maintainable by engineers, and genuinely helpful to customers. That’s how we move past hype to durable impact—shipping AI products that plan, learn, and execute at scale.
"What if an AI could spot the moment two product teams start pulling in opposite directions — before it derails a quarter?" That question hooked me, because I’ve lived through the costly fallout of subtle misalignments that only surface at the end of a sprint—or worse, during quarterly business reviews.
I recently dug into an episode of Just Now Possible featuring Matthias and Charlotte Kleverud, co-founders of Momental. Their vision for "GitHub for product management" hits a nerve in the best possible way: find "merge conflicts" in strategy, not code, and do it early enough to save execution time, trust, and outcomes.
Here’s the core: Momental ingests documents, meeting transcripts, and voice recordings across an organization, then uses AI agents to map them into a structured context layer—a set of interconnected trees covering goals, decisions, learnings, and who's doing what. When it finds a conflict—say, one team betting on retention while another is prioritizing conversion—it surfaces the misalignment for humans to resolve, just like a merge conflict in code. That framing is both familiar (for anyone who’s shipped software) and powerful (for anyone who’s scaled product strategy across multiple teams).
Their journey tracks with what many of us have learned the hard way. "Starting in 2022 with DaVinci 002 and learning that the market wasn't ready for AI-assisted product thinking" pushed them toward experiments with agent teams. "The origin story: building a team of AI agents in 2024, only to discover agents hit the same alignment problems as humans" is exactly the kind of meta-lesson I’d expect when you scale autonomy without shared context. The breakthrough was an "OODA-loop-driven document processing agent" that continuously curates a living knowledge graph rather than relying on static prompts or brittle pipelines.
One model that stood out was "The product chain: signals → learnings → decisions → principles, and how AI maps it." That is the backbone of healthy product thinking. When this chain is explicit and inspectable, you can trace why a team chose Path A over Path B—and detect when new signals should invalidate old decisions. I’ve seen this accelerate continuous discovery and improve executive decision hygiene.
I also appreciated the organizational modeling: "Three trees that model an organization: the product tree (OKRs to epics), the wisdom tree (decisions and their reasoning), and the people/time tree." This maps cleanly to how we run quarterly planning at scale—tying outcomes to work, preserving rationale, and grounding ownership and timelines. With that structure, "How conflicts are detected, auto-resolved, or escalated to humans with merge options" becomes a pragmatic workflow, not a theoretical AI demo.
On the technical front, they’re blunt about limits: "Why traditional chunking and RAG breaks down at scale and what Momental does instead." Anyone who’s tried to stitch strategy from ad hoc notes knows that naive retrieval won’t cut it. You need durable context boundaries, rich metadata, and graph-aware reasoning. Which brings me to one of my non-negotiables: "Why metadata—who said it, when, and in what context—is critical to preventing hallucinations." In my world, we treat provenance like test coverage—you can’t ship without it.
Process-wise, the product philosophy resonated: "How a document processing agent uses OODA-loop thinking to extract and connect context across documents" reinforces the need for short feedback cycles, explicit hypotheses, and continuous refactoring of knowledge. Pair that with "The self-improving agent: collecting user feedback weekly and rewriting its own prompts" and you’ve got a blueprint for eval-driven development that keeps the system honest over time.
Their UI choices also mirror a pattern I’ve adopted: "Moving from chat-first to UI-first to proactive agents as an AI product design pattern." Chat can feel magical, but alignment work benefits from concrete artifacts—trees, timelines, driver trees, and opportunity solution trees—so people can reason together. Then, let proactive agents watch for drift and nudge teams before the cost of change spikes.
Two broader themes are worth calling out. First, "Specialized tools win" when the problem is deep, cross-functional context like product strategy. General-purpose chatbots struggle here; domain-specific models with strong information architecture have the edge. Second, product culture matters: "Discovery Versus Vibe Coding" is not just a catchy contrast—it’s a reminder that disciplined discovery beats intuition theater when stakes are high.
As for the roadmap, I’m encouraged by their "Design partner strategy and what's next for Momental's public launch." Early design partners are where you validate signal quality, precision of conflict detection, and the ergonomics of human-in-the-loop resolution. I’m especially curious how this intersects with LLMs for product managers, outcomes vs output OKRs, and product roadmapping and sprint planning in large portfolios.
Finally, a nod to the broader ecosystem. The conversation touched on "Claude Code" and a shift "Beyond documents and vectors" that many of us are living through—toward retrieval-first pipelines that respect context windows, stronger governance, and measurable improvements in decision quality. If you care about AI Strategy for empowered product teams, this is a space to watch—and to pilot.
Bottom line: If you’ve ever wished you could prevent strategy drift before it shows up in your dashboards, this "GitHub for product management" approach is worth your attention. Make the chain of signals, learnings, decisions, and principles explicit. Keep humans in the loop for the hard calls. And let proactive, agentic AI do what it does best: flag misalignments early, so your teams can move fast together.
