From Microsoft to Qualtrics: Brad Anderson on AI’s business and personal impact

Our guest this week is Brad Anderson — a tech engineering and product leader who spent more than 17 years at Microsoft and is now approaching 5 years at Qualtrics, the experience management technology company, where he’s president of products, user experience, engineering, and security.

I’ve known Brad for a while, in fact I’ve been on two of his shows back when he was an enterprise mobility and cloud technology leader at Microsoft, and it was all the rage for executives to have their own video shows.

• There was “Lunch Break with Brad Anderson,” where he drove his guests around the streets of Redmond in his Tesla, introducing me to "Insane Mode" at the time.
• And there was “The Ship Room,” where he talked about the cloud and played games with guests, challenging me to distinguish real startup names from fake ones.

For this week’s show, I went to the Qualtrics Tower in downtown Seattle to talk with Brad about how he thinks about building tech today — how AI is starting to change the way products come together, and how expectations are shifting for both the people using the tools and the people building them.

I also turn the tables on Brad in the final segment with a game about cloud and AI terms called "Real or Ridiculous" — stick around to play along.

But first, he reminded me about the random case of mistaken identity that brought us together in the first place, back in the day. Listen to the show to hear the story, and see the related post on GeekWire to read highlights. — GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop

Edited by Curt Milton.

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