Ali Dasdan, CTO @ Dropbox, joins the pod to share insights on the company’s large-scale AI adoption and research as a foundation of successful engineering leadership. First, Ali shares insights on why he continues publishing research despite his role as a CTO and how research / curiosity can drive better trust within your organization. He shares about how his research ultimately guided decision making regarding redrawing Dropbox’s entire architecture and the importance of creating a record of the company’s progression as the rearchitecture occurred. The bulk of the conversation centers around how Dropbox is adopting AI, including tools like Nova and Dash, within both EPD and non-EPD departments. 

ABOUT ALI DASDAN

Ali Dasdan is a C-suite technology executive with 25+ years building, scaling, and leading global engineering, product, and technical-operations organizations of up to ~1,000 people across a dozen industries, in public companies, high-growth startups, and enterprises in Silicon Valley and London.

Today he is CTO of Dropbox, serving over 700 millions of users on an exabyte-scale platform with $2.5B+ revenue, where he also leads the AI strategy and AI enablement. Previously EVP and CTO of ZoomInfo and VP of Engineering at Atlassian (Confluence Cloud, Trello, Jira Work Management). As CTO (at Turn, Vida, Poynt, ZoomInfo, and Dropbox) he defines and owns company-wide technology strategy; in divisional roles (eBay, Atlassian, Tesco, Yahoo) he led engineering for revenue-critical parts of the business.

SHOW NOTES:

• Why Ali continues to publish research as a CTO (1:51)
• How research results can alter decision making as an eng leader (3:30)
• The connection between research & organizational trust (4:29)
• Redrawing the org’s architecture to learn more about it (6:00)
• What kinds of info help eng leaders better understand the business / technology (8:12)
• Building a record of the org’s progress & development (10:13)
• Where Dropbox is at in their AI adoption journey (11:58)
• AI @ Dropbox in EPD vs. non-EPD functions (13:36)
• Frameworks for implementing AI at the highest level (15:23)
• The engagement / ownership model @ Dropbox (16:58)
• Insights on Nova, Dropbox’s code review AI workflow (18:59)
• Incorporating human-driven feedback into the AI loop (21:12)
• What the immediate future looks like for automated developer tools (23:54)
• How AI has directly impacted productivity @ Dropbox (27:15)
• Addressing bottlenecks related to AI adoption (30:35)
• Using AI infrastructure to assist in non-EPD functions (32:33)
• Dash as a contextual AI platform (35:39)
• Ali’s experience with specialized models vs. foundation models (38:10)
• Rapid fire questions (39:48)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/