AI as an Expectation, Not an Exception: Nita Laad on the Future of Agentic Work
“Five years from now, AI will firmly be embedded in the fabric of life—as an expectation, not an exception.”
We’re excited to kick off our Women in AI series with Nita Laad, CEO of Nexia AI and a technology executive. Throughout her career, Nita has held executive roles leading Emerging Eechnology Strategy and Product Incubation at Hewlett Packard Inc., where she drove the strategy and incubation of generative AI software platforms, software agents, and edge AI solutions. Prior to that, at Cisco, she directed software strategy and product management for SaaS customer platforms. Today, Nita is channeling her expertise into AI entrepreneurship, currently building Nexia AI, an applied AI company focused on driving efficiency and impact for product managers. In her interview with Women Who Win, Nita shares practical insights on leveraging AI at scale, her perspective on the future of agentic AI, what she believes will set AI startups apart in a crowded market, and her favorite non-work AI use case. Enjoy her story.
1. Tell us your story. You spent many years in senior leadership roles at HP and Cisco, leading major product and AI initiatives before starting your own company. How did those experiences shape the kind of leader and founder you’ve become?
When I reflect back on my experiences at HP and Cisco, these became my foundation in building category shaping, best in class products at scale- with all the challenges, chaos and complexity that comes with it. It taught me to lead with a bold vision, iterate fast and execute on measurable metrics with precision.
Leading teams to build enterprise grade software platforms, agents and enterprise systems used by millions of users - I learned that innovation isn’t just about breakthroughs—it’s about human application of the breakthrough technology to solve real problems with measurable impact. You can have the best algorithm, but if it fails to measurably improve your customer’s workflow, it’s of no use.
Those experiences shaped me into a founder who thinks in terms of customer outcomes, not just the tech stack. I learned to lead with authenticity, integrity, clarity and empathy: build organizations that let brilliant people thrive and grow, while managing the human side of adoption. While launching a new software platform at Cisco for example, I realized that even the most advanced technical features were of no use if customers could not trust the analytics and recommendations and see an outcome that directly related to their business growth. That lesson—designing technology that humans actually use and benefit from—is at the heart of how I lead Nexia AI today.
2. You’ve led teams building everything from AI-powered agentic platforms to infrastructure and wearables. What are the key strategies and tips you learned when it comes to using AI at scale?
Agentic AI at scale sounds simple in concept but is excruciatingly hard in practice when you are building. The technical challenges—data pipelines, model hallucinations, agent autonomy, orchestration, latency—are just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest challenge is gaining customer mindshare, measurable trust, adoption, and orchestration across users and systems. You engineer an experience to meet the customer where they are, evolve your roadmap, tech stack and experience alongside your customers trust and governance models and partner with your customers on the journey.
Important strategies and principles which I have implemented at Nexia AI:
1. Design for the human-first experience and the workflow. Embed into the Product Manager’s day at work. Start with the human and then expand the workflow and optimize the model.
2. Everything we build has to adjust, modify, iterate, and evolve. The AI architecture stack is evolving. AI Protocols (MCP & A2A) will continue to evolve, The models will retrain or release new capabilities, Customer data keeps evolving, & our platform has to adjust without having to break everything downstream.
3. Focus on customer impact, not agent or output accuracy. Software may be able to perform analysis, but if it is not able to take actions or make decisions based on said analysis that could positively affect our customers' product metrics, it doesn’t matter. At scale, AI should feel invisible yet indispensable, it is so well integrated into your daily experience that you feel the productivity drain when you don’t have it.
3. There’s a lot of excitement around agentic AI right now. When you think about agentic AI five years from now, what change do you believe will matter most, not for technology teams, but for the people using it every day?
Models think, while Agents execute. Five years from now, AI will firmly be embedded in the “Fabric of life”, as an expectation, not an exception. Agentic AI will assume responsibility for certain use cases of administrative burden or Digital Friction type of use cases such as meeting scheduling, follow-throughs, analysis, documentation, decision-support.
Specifically in Future of Work - Envision this: You begin your day with all the emails, meetings and chats processed by your AI assistant, and all of the data and analysis you need to make key decisions being ready for you when you login. AI truly becomes your invisible partner.
That's not just an increase in productivity - it is human uplift through cognitive liberation. People can devote time and effort to innovating, strategizing, and networking, instead of spending time fighting fires or working on boring reports. This is, in my opinion, what it means to have the mission at Nexia AI: finally enabling Product Teams to engage with customers and drive business outcomes that require humans only.
4. With so many AI startups in the market, what gap are you focused on filling with Nexia AI, and what problem feels most important for you to solve right now?
The AI market is extremely saturated and fragmented. Everyone is solving micro-problems —transcription, summarization, chatbots, analytics—but customers are burnt out in tool and context switching - That’s where Nexia AI comes in.
We’re building an intelligent workflow layer for product teams. Nexia AI doesn’t just give you analysis insights, it connects context, decisions, and outcomes across systems and people and executes the workflow for you.
Solving this problem is deep, complicated and messy—I’m obsessed with it because when Product teams are free from the repeated low impact work, they don’t just execute—they innovate faster. That directly benefits the customer’s business outcomes.
5. To end on a fun note, what’s one behind-the-scenes way you use AI day to day that others might not realize is possible yet?
I work alongside a rockstar team of AI agents that act as a “first draft” partner for all non-engineering activities. My team of agents handles tasks such as email categorization, calendaring, corporate social media, web portal, drafted presentations, product demonstrations, product collateral, strategy analysis, and more! The best part is that in none of these cases could AI ever replace me; it only enhanced my work while allowing me to work faster and make better decisions than ever! And on a fun note AI also plans my OOTD and workouts
Thank you Nita for sharing your inspiring story with us. We are excited to have you in our global women’s network!
Bio: Nita Laad is a technology entrepreneur and seasoned Fortune 100 product executive with significant leadership and impact driving innovation and scale across software engineering, product management, and go-to-market strategy at startups, midsized, and Big Tech companies. Most recently, she founded and serves as CEO of Nexia AI, a SF Bay Area-based applied-AI venture building an agentic AI workflow platform to empower product teams by offloading administrative and analytical tasks to AI, allowing PMs to focus on customer-centric innovation. Previously, Nita held executive roles leading Emerging Technology Strategy and Product Incubation at Hewlett Packard Inc. (2023–2025), where she led the strategy and incubation of generative-AI software platforms, software agents, and edge-AI solutions. At Cisco (2020–2023), she directed software strategy and product management for SaaS customer platforms, enterprise agreements, and licensing, delivering business-model innovation and significantly scaling Cisco’s ~$20B+ software business. Nita holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from San José State University, is a published IEEE author on software agents, and a recognized thought leader in applied-AI product innovation and scaling. In 2025, she was honored with the Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence award and WomenTech Global Awards (Product Management Leader of the Year 2025, Female Founder Rising Star 2025).