Sridhar Vembu, founder and former CEO of Zoho, has shared his perspective on how software engineers can stay relevant in the age of artificial intelligence, urging them to prioritise deep domain expertise over pure coding skills.
In a post shared on X this morning, Vembu said that while programming remains a foundational skill, it is specialised knowledge of a domain that ultimately delivers value to customers. He added that businesses are willing to pay not just for technical execution, but for reliability, security, support and compliance—areas where human expertise continues to matter.
Sridhar Vembu’s advice to techies
“Here is what I tell our software engineers on how to thrive in the AI era: be very good domain experts. Programming skills are the foundation (and we definitely don’t want to lose them) but deep domain knowledge is what customers pay for, along with reliability, security, support and compliance,” Vembu said in his X post.
Vembu, 58, weighed in on the ongoing debate around AI-driven productivity gains. While acknowledging that AI tools can significantly speed up the creation of working prototypes, he noted that building a finished product involves multiple stages, many of which cannot yet be accelerated by AI.
“Don’t obsess about programmer productivity”
Because of this, Vembu advised tech teams not to focus too much on how fast they can write code. Instead, they should use AI to improve the overall experience for customers.
“The productivity gains from AI are still hotly debated: we definitely get to a working prototype much faster but a finished product has a lot more to it and not all the stages can be sped up by AI,” he said.
“There is a lot of needless or incidental complexity in software that can be eliminated by AI,” Vembu concluded.
In three decades of its existence, Zoho has never carried out mass layoffs. The IT company did not lay off employees even after the advent of AI, which promoted job cuts in giants like Meta, Oracle, Amazon and many more.
(Also read: ‘Got laid off without notice’: Zoho breaks silence on employee’s viral allegation)
Vembu’s comments come as the tech industry continues to figure out how AI will change the way engineers work. Several companies have encouraged employees to adopt AI tools in their workflow for increased productivity. However, the impact has not always been positive.
At Amazon, for example, a group of employees pointed out that the company’s internal push for all employees to use AI tools was actually unhelpful and increased workload. “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone,” one employee told The Guardian last month.
(Also read: Employee automates 60% of team’s workload using AI but hesitates to tell manager because…)