Todd Olson, Founder & CEO, Pendo

In an interview with Invest:, Todd Olson discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping software development, customer expectations, and Pendo’s strategy. Olson also highlighted the Research Triangle’s higher education network, quality of life, and business-friendly environment as foundations for growth. “This culture of experimentation where you’re constantly iterating your way to a better solution, I think that’s the mentality you have to have,” Olson said.

What changes over the past year have had the greatest impact on Pendo, and how have they influenced your priorities?

The biggest change we are seeing in the market is the proliferation of AI, and I think it is impacting every business. Every business is trying to figure out what AI means to them and how to take advantage of the technology to operate as effectively as possible.

Companies are also thinking about how AI impacts their overall market. What does it mean when this technology is fully adopted by everyone? How do they adapt the way the company operates to take advantage of it?

Pendo is right in the crosshairs of this because we are a technology company. We have built new products to help measure and improve AI solutions, and we have started adopting AI significantly inside the company, beginning with our engineering organization and expanding across the entire organization.

What problem did you see in the market when you founded Pendo?

Having grown up in the industry and built many software applications, I saw that companies were often guessing at how users were using their products. Yet they were making decisions about what to build next, where to innovate, and how to delight users in ways that would retain them and attract new ones.

We saw an opportunity to measure actual adoption. Companies needed to know whether the things they were building were valuable enough and whether people used them. They could then use that data to inform how they steered the direction of the product.

Before Pendo, people had no idea how users interacted with software. Most industries have metrics for what works and what does not. Media companies know which content performs. Advertisers measure which ads are effective, and retailers measure many aspects of customer activity. Companies building digital services did not have metrics showing what worked and what did not. We were solving that need.

What are organizations trying to understand about their customers today that may not have been as important a few years ago?

The dominant question we hear from customers is how AI is impacting the overall user experience. Are people actually adopting it? When they adopt it, is it a better experience than the traditional interfaces they had?

AI is affecting many interfaces. For example, people can now use AI to search for products on retail platforms. Companies want to know whether people are using those features and whether the experience is better or worse than the previous one.

A lot of investment is going into adding this technology to interfaces, and companies want to know whether they are receiving a return on that investment. We have continued expanding our products to better answer that question.

In addition to looking holistically at how people adopt software, we have added more capabilities to understand the types of conversations people are having with AI. We are beginning to give companies those answers.

Where do you see the greatest AI-related opportunities for businesses over the next few years?

AI is creating many opportunities. One interesting factor is that there is far more demand than supply. We do not have enough supply because AI requires more physical infrastructure than is currently available.

That means people are trying to build more infrastructure, creating opportunities across physical goods. That includes data centers, chips, cooling systems, building materials, racks, and bandwidth. The downstream effect of the supply-and-demand imbalance is significant.

Once that demand is met, the next question is what AI means for society when it becomes pervasive and always available. What types of companies can be created based on all this information?

We are also seeing high-quality and poor-quality AI solutions, and the difference is often context and data. Companies must determine how to provide AI with the right data so it does not hallucinate and can answer questions effectively.

Cost is another factor. Companies are considering whether they should use open-source models and when an open-source model makes more sense than a frontier model from a company such as Anthropic or OpenAI.

The rise of coding agents is also important. Businesses may ask whether they should buy an application to perform a task or build one themselves because it is becoming much easier to build software.

AI has addressed one of the scarcity problems in the economy, which is software developers. We used to have a scarcity of software developers, but now anyone can become a software developer with an AI coding agent. That is exciting.

What makes the Research Triangle a strong place to build and grow an innovative company?

It is all about people. The Raleigh-Durham area has an incredible richness of higher education, with three major universities in the Triangle and even more institutions just outside the area.

The region produces more than 30,000 college graduates a year. That creates a large pool of highly educated people whom companies have the opportunity to attract and build businesses around.

That talent base is combined with a high quality of life, an affordable place to live, solid infrastructure, and a business-friendly environment. The combination of those factors is a good recipe.

What advice would you give business leaders trying to balance rapid innovation with a reliable customer experience?

If you are trying to move quickly, as everyone is today, while maintaining high quality, the best approach is to continue measuring and understanding what is happening.

You do not want to slow down, so you need high-quality feedback loops. As you build new things, you need to understand how they are performing. If they are not performing well, fix them. If they are performing well, move on to the next thing.

This culture of experimentation, where you’re constantly iterating your way to a better solution – that’s the mentality you have to have.

What are your top priorities for Pendo over the next three to five years?

Our priority is to shift toward becoming what the market describes as an AI-native business. Hopefully, it will not take three years to get there, but that is our goal.

We also want to continue driving growth at scale. We will continue building our international presence. We now have offices across Europe, Asia, and South America, and we expect to continue growing internationally and building out our product suite.

What will businesses expect from software in the future, and how is Pendo preparing for that shift?

Businesses will expect software to be agentic because they are beginning to experience that today. One characteristic of agentic software is that it should be much easier to use.

People will not expect software to require hundreds of clicks to complete a task. They will expect to be able to say what they want to do and have the software do it.

People are also re-evaluating software pricing models. They will not want to pay for software they are not using. Usage-based or outcome-based pricing will be a significant part of the future.