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

RALEIGH, N.C., May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Pendo, the product intelligence company, today announced that Zain Lakhani has joined the company as its first chief AI officer. Lakhani will oversee AI engineering as Pendo scales its suite of agentic products.

"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 will report to Chief Development Officer Saurabh Sodani and focus on accelerating the development and deployment of production-grade AI systems across architecture, product development, and partnerships.

Lakhani joins Pendo from LightCI, an AI engineering firm he founded and scaled to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue in four years, partnering with companies including Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain. Through LightCI's partnership with Pendo since November 2025, he contributed to the development of Agent Analytics, the first-of-its-kind observability solution for measuring the performance, usage, and business impact of AI agents; and Novus — the product agent that automatically detects and fixes usability issues as 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."

The announcement builds on Pendo's recent AI momentum, including recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for 2026; general availability of its MCP Server and inclusion in Claude's Connectors Directory and ChatGPT's app directory; the launch of the Pendo Agent on the Google Marketplace; and new partnerships with Fin, Planview and Atlassian to provide product context to their agents.

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. Learn more at pendo.com.

SOURCE Pendo