Ethan LockshinSales at NVIDIA focused on AI adoption

You.com CPO Saurabh Sharma on Competing With AI Giants: The Race Is Just Beginning

Name: You.com CPO Saurabh Sharma on Competing With AI Giants: The Race Is Just Beginning
Uploaded: 2025-10-13T14:30:34+00:00
Duration: 1 min 44 s
Channel: Ethan Lockshin
Description: You.com's CPO Saurabh Sharma says the startup beats AI giants by avoiding vendor lock-in. While Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI build closed ecosystems…

13 Oct 2025 · 2 min

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1:44

You.com's CPO Saurabh Sharma says the startup beats AI giants by avoiding vendor lock-in. While Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI build closed ecosystems, You.com mixes open-source models and off-the-shelf tools like Amazon's RAG systems, giving developers and CIOs the flexibility the big players won't offer.

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You.com is one of the fastest growing startups in AI. You're at the helm as the chief Product officer. You're competing with trillion dollar companies like Google and Microsoft and OpenAI. Where does you.com carve out an edge that those giants can't?
Yeah, it's a great question and something that we thought about. A lot of the most important things that we found is that the giants are making ecosystems by default. Right? That is their goal, to build their ecosystem out and to drive lock in in that ecosystem. But when we talk to customers, every customer that we see says, I don't want to be locked into that ecosystem. I don't know who's going to turn out ahead. Is it going to be OpenAI's models, is it going to be Anthropic's models, is it going to be Google's models? Right. And they don't want lock in at this, you know, kind of the early innings of the AI game. And so we're optimizing for developers, we're optimizing for CIOs who need a transparent, trustworthy and you know, partner to build their solutions on top of. If you're a developer that's looking for building block APIs to build your agents or you're a CIO is looking for a trusted partner to navigate and execute on your business transformation goals, they come to us because if they go to some of the big tech folks, big tech is going to steer them towards whatever it is that they're selling. Those things are good, don't get me wrong. Right. We build on top of those many times, but we act more as a trusted partner. That's going to help you navigate that. Right. And we can offer things for, for example, if the best thing for you is to use an open source LLM with a off the shelf rag system that Amazon has, great, we're going to put that together. A lot of the big tech folks will not do that because it's not in their own interest of building that ecosystem, that ecosystem lock in. That is the fundamental basis of their business.