Pendo Appoints Zain Lakhani as First Chief AI Officer

Zain Lakhani will report to Saurabh Sodani and will focus on speeding up the development and rollout of production-ready AI systems across product architecture, development, and partnerships.

Zain Lakhani joins Pendo from LightCI, an AI engineering firm he founded and grew to 250 employees and $100 million in revenue within four years. During that time, LightCI worked with major companies including Google, Apple, OpenAI, and LangChain.

Through LightCIs partnership with Pendo since November 2025, Lakhani helped develop Agent Analytics, a platform for tracking the performance, usage, and business impact of AI agents, as well as Novus. This product agent automatically identifies and fixes usability issues during product releases.

The announcement adds to Pendo’s recent AI growth and achievements, including being named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for 2026. The company also recently launched its MCP Server, which is now included in Anthropic Claude’s Connectors Directory and OpenAI ChatGPT’s app directory.

Pendo also launched the Pendo Agent on the Google Marketplace and announced new partnerships with Fin, Planview, and Atlassian to provide product context for their AI agents.

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"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."

About Pendo

Founded in 2013 by Todd Olson, Erik Troan, and Rahul Jain, Pendo helps companies improve digital product experiences through its product intelligence platform. Built on trillions of behavioral data points, the platform helps businesses understand how users and AI agents interact with software and improve product performance and user value. Pendo is headquartered in Raleigh and operates 10 offices worldwide.

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