From Consumer AI to Developer APIs — You.com's CPO Saurabh Sharma Breaks It Down

You.com has been around for a while and it had a lot of success early on in the consumer AI space, but recently it's shifted more to focusing on APIs and developers. Where did that progression come from?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think it goes back to, you know, that the half life of innovation is shorter in the AI space than in any other space that I've ever been in. What we found was we were good at consumer AI search, we had a lot of good momentum there and we started seeing was two trends come come alive. Number one is that developers would come to us and say, hey, I would love to use your web search API or I would love to use parts of your AI stack to power my application. And so we actually started a team that said, okay, let's go off and actually make our internals visible. External, right, let's see, there's something there. And what started off as a bit of a side project for some engineers that were really interested has now grown into the fastest part of our business, the fastest growing part of our business. And what we're starting to see is we still have a very healthy AI consumer search based business. But API building blocks business, what we call our API building blocks, web search, other web APIs, data APIs, AI APIs is actually growing faster and it made sense to start to double down on that. That's this great accruing advantage where you do one thing in one area, it is causing us to speed up in another area which then is delivering feedback to that initial area as well. So today that's where we see us. We help the world build agents. Whether you're a developer that is looking for building blocks to drive your agents and go to market faster, or whether you're a CIO looking for a trusted partner and thought leader to help you execute on your AI transformation mandate. That's a story of really evolving as AI evolves over the last few years and I think U.com is right in the center of that evolution as well.