TIME100: Anton Osika on the Future of Work | Dreamforce 2026

Hello, everyone, and welcome. It's great to see so many of you. Today's session is on— well, the title is The Future of Work is Software Without a Middleman. And Lovable hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year. Tripled that ARR in just 9 months and is one of the fastest-growing software companies ever. And all of that was built on a simple bet that the person with the problem should be able to build the solution. So that solo builder might be a new founder, but increasingly we're seeing that it's also people who are sitting within existing businesses. Employees at nearly 2/3 of the Fortune 500 build with Lovable. And you have customers including Adidas and NVIDIA. And the pattern really seems to be that a side project for an employee can quite quickly become a company-wide deployment. And so I'm joined here today by Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika. And we're going to be talking about what happens when building software stops being a specialist job and what that means for how companies build and staff and ship. So thank you so much for joining me, Anton.

It's great to be here, Ayesha. Looking forward to this conversation and the democratization that we're seeing. Great.

So I'd love to start by talking a little bit about the bet and what you actually mean by the people who are closest to the problem being the ones who should build the software. In what way do you see them as being— how are they the closest to the problem and what should they be building?

It means the people who have the knowledge. And it can be a leader or an individual in marketing, in finance, or in— we're seeing a lot of people in HR building really impressive software. And I'll give you an example of someone who transformed their company from a quite early stage of where Lovable is compared to where we are now on the enterprise and IT security side. And this man, He was the leader at a company called Nursa. It's a healthcare staffing company. His name is Nenad, and what Nenad told me is that he wanted to build a new product line for healthcare staffing. And it's about getting more nurses, more healthcare workers, so educating them to become nurses. And he found Lovable. He thought, let me try and see how far can I get to build out a completely new product line. And he thought he could build a prototype, but it turns out that he could build the entire product, the entire software, including the administration, scheduling, the certification for new nurses on top of our platform. And then have this, the guardrails for the security taking care of him so he could bring on real individuals to trust that product line. And what's key about Ninad, I think, is I heard Marc Benioff now talk a lot about trailblazers on the big stage. And Ninad is one of those persons who has creativity, ambition, the people I started the company for. And an example of what he did after he built the product is that he took the leadership team together and he said, every single day we're using all this vast amounts of different tools that are legacy. They're really old and they get in the way of a lot of the work we do. How about we try to improve the software that we're running our business on? And the entire back office, finance, the operations who are doing healthcare staffing, pretty complex operations, they built out more than 10 different applications that they can now— that they are now using to run their business on. And rather than those applications living in isolation, there's a one-click button and then any agent, any chat that you might be using at Nursa can talk to those applications. So what we're seeing is that 55% of our customers and users, they have more than 11 years of experience and they can put that knowledge and do what was previously monopolized by engineering departments and unlock how they want to work and evolve the software that they use on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah, and you yourself came from a non-typical background. You were in particle physics at CERN. So do you think that that kind of path as an outsider helped to shape your thinking about who should be able to build the software?

I don't know, but what I do know is that I think people with expertise and close to the problem, they should be the one building software, not people with certain types of certifications that should be allowed to do that. And I think what is relevant from physics is that it's one of these type of training grounds where you are trained to take a very ambiguous problem And then break that down and analyze what is the right solution for this problem. And that's the same thing that software engineers have been doing for quite a few decades. And it's the same type of skill set that you develop when you put your hands on the keyboard and you have something you're passionate about changing in how your company works or an idea that you want to make come true, maybe just a new marketing website for your business. And then you will together within AI as your co-founder in building this initiative, putting this initiative through, learn what works. Maybe I only get 80% there on the first try, but that you finesse that skill set, which is to break down some very complex problem into a system, which is software, and then you bring it to the rest of your organization, and oftentimes you bring it to your customers. And you get that feedback loop in, which I think is very valuable. And physics is one of the training grounds. I think building is generally the best training ground for that skill set.

Yeah, and we're here talking about kind of potentially working without the middleman. When we're thinking that that might be quite concerning to some engineers, maybe some in the audience, Is that— is the engineer really out of the loop, or is that role going to be evolving?

Some of the engineers that I know, the best engineers, they are— they're more productive than ever before, and they have much more impact and value to the business than they, they had in the past. And the key things there are is that they take initiative. They're very curious about what can I change for, for my business. Now these engineers, they are rightfully rivaled by people from across the business. They come from sales, customer success, our go-to-market and sales team. They are— they have reimagined how they operate on top of software that they built and that they evolve as they're changing how they work in the sales department. And it's of course connected to our CRM and What turns out is that the engineers, they have some advantages in having a lot of impact in these times. But if you're close to the problem and you have that drive, creativity, and good judgment for what makes sense in terms of how software should work, then you can be exceptionally productive without the engineering background. And that's what the platform like ours enables, especially When you're not technical, you need some of those guardrails in how do we make sure that this thing that we built is secure and that we can trust what we built before we put real users on the software that we built.

Yeah. And I also kind of want to talk about how this actually lands inside big companies. You've got a growing roster of enterprise customers. it's often the same story. One person's kind of side project suddenly becomes company-wide. Can you talk us through that jump and what it takes to change organizationally in terms of approvals and security and the role of IT?

What we're seeing is that it starts with an individual that brings it to their teams and then When the entire company sees the value in how fast you can move, it penetrates the entire company. And it usually starts with someone like Ninad, who I brought up, who is that partly visionary, creative person that wants to see change and has that judgment to anchor with IT and security that we need approval once for this platform. And then working together with them to make sure that you can connect all the data sources you want to connect. And it could be, I mean, Salesforce is an amazing platform for your data, but it can also be other external providers of data that you want to connect to. You want to use something like Google Search in the application that you're building to build software with AI and voice that was not even possible to build a few years ago. And it's really coming bottoms up from every single department inside of the enterprise customers. that we're seeing. The change that we're witnessing as of lately, as we've been investing a lot more than anything else on the security and trust side, is that IT goes from being this last no to what you wanted to roll out to being the first yes, we understand this platform. And this is the way that we avoid shadow IT and the sprawl of different tools that we don't even know who's maintaining them. And there's thousands and millions of stories of people building something that they never even dreamt of being possible to build it for in the enterprise. And then of course, side projects from solo builders.

And what have you learned from seeing that kind of playing out at the Uber-level companies versus that you might not have learned at the more kind of individual builder level?

Yeah, so we started the company because I've always run into so many people with great ideas and ambition who for decades have had to wait for permission to be able to even try out and test their ideas. And the biggest growth in the beginning, that was from the solo builders. And what the solo builders taught us was the importance of speed. And it's both creating the software, but it's everything in speed that comes after. How do you host this in a reliable and scalable way, the application that you built? And how do you quickly set up email flows? You connect to all the tools that you might want to connect to. And that's about speed. Now that we've been pulled into all of this interest in how you change software development in larger companies, then it's about security and trust. Once you put a software in front of a real customer, a real user, then trust and safety, that is the product. That is the product. And that's why we make sure to invest in that administrator, the IT administrator, or whoever is the administrator in a company. Maybe it's the CFO. They can get that overview of what are all the applications that are being built, and which ones are being used and have real sensitive data connected to them, so they can audit them. And it's also about letting actual software engineers go in and modify the code with whatever tools they want to modify it with, and look at the code, and deploy it in whatever way that makes most sense for some mission-critical, maybe healthcare, types of applications. So we're learning all the time, which is extremely exciting for me and the entire product and engineering team that are moving at absolutely lightning speed.

Yeah. And to kind of ask maybe a slightly more difficult question, some critics might say that AI-built software is going to present issues because you know, when you build something, um, and it's being built by people outside of engineering, you've got this kind of security risk. Um, so what would your answer be to, to those people? Um, and, uh, you know, sort of inside a company, how do they address those compliance obligations?

Yeah, we spoke a bit about this now. Um, I think we're way past vibes, which is what this type of software development with AI used to be called, right? And we're way past vibes. And it actually turns out that AI is getting much better than humans at finding the vulnerabilities in software, which is what you need to do. You need to look for, are there any vulnerabilities in the software that's being built? And what the platform that we have built now is that At every change in the software, it's automatically being scanned for free because we care about that trust so much, for vulnerabilities. And there are external penetration testing companies that are going across multiple categories of types of software being built on our platform and finding, can things built on Lovable actually be trusted? And the answer so far when they do those test is that Lovable ranks absolutely in the top on that you can trust the software that's being built. And it comes from extremely hard work being done by the team that I'm really grateful for over the last 12 months. The thing that comes after is the software secure? Is who has access to what data in the application that was built? Has this been configured correctly? So you can imagine if someone in HR builds a tool where they put in a lot of information about the individuals in your company, that should be seen by HR, by the managers, depending on who it is, right? And this is something where AI can also do a really good job, but you want to anchor and work, collaborate closely with IT and being able to have that transparency to IT of who, when I build this application, is It should be extremely clear who should have access to what data. And one of the ways that we're solving for this is that when you connect data, you connect— let's say you build an application, you want to connect AI in that application, you want to connect your Salesforce data, then the connectors, the Salesforce connectors, it provides a lot of guardrails so that you are— it's very clear this connector has a scope. of what data it can access, what data it cannot access, depending on who is logged into the application. And this is an evolving field. And I think it's one of the most important things when it comes to trust and how software and AI in general is being used, right? So it's very important that companies like us and Salesforce, which I think is amazing, takes this topic very, very seriously.

Yeah, and how do you— how are you sort of thinking about the software that's being built by these teams talking to the systems that already exist within a business. What does that kind of mean for a company?

What it means for the company that you can build software that connects your data. So I think if you were on stage or if you listened to Mark Benioff on stage, he spoke a lot about the new interface for Salesforce is not Salesforce itself. And that's exactly the future that we've been believing in as well. The people who are doing the day-to-day work is— A fun example, the 300 McDonald's restaurants in the Nordics in Europe, they are all interfacing with a system that is built on Lovable for being on top of incidents or requests that's happening on the floor. And that tool is something that everyone can be involved in making sure it works as well as possible for them on the floor. So if you're an operations manager for an organization, then what I think you want to do is to say, hey, we have this tool. Anyone can propose changes to the tool using Loveable. And then in that way, the tool evolves. It connects to everything that you want it to connect to, maybe even making phone calls with AI or sending text messages. And it can be the interface to the data that you have stored in Salesforce or in any other data warehouse that your company might be using. So this is a change. And the way to really lean in and be at the forefront is to try to build with— I mean, try to build with Lovable.ai and connect it to the things that you want to connect with. And you get through that feedback loop and you can accelerate how your company works, how your company works with the optimal software for you, and how you can add AI in the seams between or in the interfaces that you're building for your company and for your customers.

Yeah. And another thing that I'm kind of curious about is You know, if, uh, if we're getting to a point where everybody sort of has access to these tools, what would you say separates the companies, um, that get real value out of using them compared to the ones that don't?

I, um, I want to stress that everyone should try to use these tools. Because it puts you— you should run a hackathon internally and say, okay, let's take something you're passionate about and that you have a vision for what you want to change. I spoke to a head of people at Akosha, a VC, and she had been building out a completely new voice interface for doing performance reviews. And she was so passionate about that, right? And everyone should try to take something they're frustrated with or passionate about and try to make a better version of that. Then if you want to break— but the real impact comes when it's deployed in production and someone is responsible for evolving it and making sure it's evolved in the right way. And, um, it's important that you try using the tools, but then if you're in the leadership or you're close to leadership, you have a process to evaluate which are the tools we should be using. Is applications that you built yourself And maybe the thing you build this month is going to be outdated because someone else in the organization builds something new next month. And that process for deciding what are we going to sunset, what are we going to— where are we going to try to innovate, and where are we building new experiences, new interfaces for our end customers so that we can give them more value and get more growth and customers that come to our company. That's a process that you have to figure out, and the leadership has to— in any company should be thinking about this revolution where we are tearing down— where this monopoly of who can build software is being torn down. So the ones that let everyone experiment but also have— they're critical and have judgment about what are the right things to build, those are the companies that are being successful.

Well, and I'm sure many leaders are kind of thinking about this. If they're thinking about how to let those people who are outside of engineering start using this tool, what do you think is the first thing that they should try, and what should they definitely not be trying?

The first thing to try, I think it comes back to something that isn't too ambitious. Even though you're often surprised by how much you can do so fast now. Something that's not too ambitious, where you understand who are the stakeholders that you want to— that you will probably need to convince and how you're going to convince them that this is the new way that you should be running things inside of your company. Or just run something as a side project for fun for your team to create a game together, for example. And then when you've felt that entire feedback loop, you published applications to the people in who has access to your workspace, or maybe published it to the entire world, then you can come together and you can say, wow, so this actually worked. This worked end to end. Um, what are the things that are going to be more complicated to accelerate? Where, where do we need to change how maybe some of the wiring done by engineers is done in this business by talking to the engineers, maybe talking to the Lovable Solutions team, and rewire some of the business, rewire some of the processes from the ground up. And I think that's an important distinction in how you roll something out. You start small and then you take it to rethink and reimagine how your business should operate once people have learned and seen what is being possible.

And do you have any advice for someone who maybe is a little bit of a novice here and has never done this, never used a tool like yours before, on where to start, how to first kind of approach that?

I mean, you should just sign up with Deliverable on your phone or when you get back. It's free to use. And that's one of the reasons we're growing so extremely explosively and fast. It's free to use, and you get that wow moment. You can take a website that you're not happy with and say, can you create a new version of this website? I have a new vision for this website. And then when you've gone through that aha moment, you think about how would this have to be rolled out to be successful at my company? And you either yourself or by talking to someone, you make sure that Lovable can be rolled out and being connected to the data. Where I think again that Salesforce as a data hub for your business is amazing. I think Lovable is absolutely amazing. That's what my customers keep telling me when I meet them for dinner. It's revolutionary. And the two together are even more amazing. And I think this is the future that you can build when you yourself get into the shoes of what it is like to build software and to change how your business operates by changing software yourself.

And just as we kind of come into our last few minutes of the session, I want to talk about the kind of competitive environment We've got Cursor, Replit, others that are scaling fast. What would you say that enterprises are actually choosing between when from the outside a lot of these tools look quite similar?

I think the key thing and what we've learned by working with this enterprise demand is that you want to have the right primitives, we call them the guardrails, for how are things connected, How can an administrator see what are the applications that are being built? Are there any vulnerabilities in those applications before they go live? That is the key thing that you should be assessing if you're looking at what tools should I be using. And Lovable isn't doing that just code generation for any code. It's this platform that is opinionated about how should that— how should software run and be deployed and evolve in a secure way? And secondly, you should be thinking about who do I want to be empowered in my organization? I think it should be the people close to the problem, close to the problems, if that wasn't clear. And you should be looking at who was this tool built for? Was it built for the people who are engineers by training, or is it built for everyone else who don't necessarily have that technical background. And this is, I think, the differentiator between these different tools. And that's what I'm hearing from customers that do these comparisons. Maybe they think, oh, I need some— the most sophisticated tool that engineers are using. And then they try— I heard about this yesterday over dinner— they try Lovable. Everyone in the organization is just Oh my God, I could build. I didn't get stuck anywhere, and I didn't need any of these API keys I've been hearing about. It just worked. Right.

Yeah.

Have you been building on Lovables?

I have to admit I haven't, but I will be as soon as I get off stage. I will be. Final question for you. You're based in Sweden. I'm based in London. We're here in San Francisco. What do you think is something that people here particularly kind of get wrong about the European AI industry?

People see Europe and they think it's slow, but if you go to the tech hubs in Europe, it's absolutely buzzing ecosystem. Everyone is just building and innovating like never before. I want to say we are a global company with offices We have a wonderful office here, in Boston, New York, but most of our engineers building the product and all the guardrails and the platform, they are in Stockholm. And the reason we're so successful is that the deep care about every single detail about the product is something that I think has a lot of DNA in the Nordics specifically. The proof is in the pudding of the very successful companies, not just not Lovable specifically, but there are great companies and products that are coming out from Stockholm specifically that comes from a certain judgment about how should a product, how should a platform work so that everyone who touches it, the consumers, enterprise users, they fall in love. And I think the platform we want, the The product that we want to build is that everyone should be able to build products where the users, they just fall in love with what they're using because of the small details in how that product works and how it is designed.

Is that why it's called Lovable?

That is correct, yes.

Great.

So you shouldn't build software that just works. It should capture people's emotions. And that's been the ethos of how we've been building. and what we want to give the capabilities to our users to be able to do as well.

Well, I think that's a great positive note to end on. Please join me in thanking Anton.