- Miro's CEO says the company is plowing cash into AI subscriptions to help employees level up.
- "Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," Andrey Khusid said.
- AI adoption is accelerating, and with it come questions about the technology's ROI.
Plenty of companies are still debating whether costly AI subscriptions are worth it. Miro has gone the other way.
Andrey Khusid, cofounder of Miro, the maker of a popular online whiteboard platform, says the company gives employees essentially unlimited access to the latest AI tools as a way to speed up how quickly they learn and work.
That approach is possible, he said, because Miro has been profitable since 2016. The company has raised $476 million to date, and Khusid suggested it does not expect to need more capital.
Khusid framed the spending as a core part of more traditional workplace training. "Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," he said.
Rather than asking employees to learn on their own time or pay out of pocket, he said, Miro wants that experimentation to happen inside the company, as a shared effort. He later added that there should still be a clear business case for buying any tool.
Miro's strategy is part of a wider shift in tech, where AI adoption is moving from optional to expected. A new study from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish, based on data from more than 700 companies, found that 64% now produce a majority of their code with AI assistance. Tech giants like Google are pushing employees to use AI tools more aggressively, and Microsoft has begun tying AI usage to performance evaluations. As a result, AI fluency is quickly becoming a core workplace skill rather than a nice-to-have.
Still, Khusid says many executives ask the wrong question about AI ROI. Rather than judging the tools on individual productivity gains or subscription costs, he said Miro is trying to focus on whether the company is moving faster overall.
The company tracks projects through what he described as a "discover, define, deliver" process and measures how long it takes to move from one stage to the next. The goal is to compress that timeline as much as possible.
"The most important metric from my perspective is velocity of innovation," Khusid said. "If you don't innovate fast enough, you're out of the game."
Khusid said he doesn't think the way companies use AI today is necessarily the end state. He said it will take at least until the end of this year, or even next year, to see what a workplace shaped by these tools really looks like. At that point, Miro will take a harder look at which tools are worth the price tag.
For now, he said, Miro is already seeing time savings across engineering, product, and design. That's not always the case, though. Better tools speed code generation, he said, but code reviews can still bog down projects.
"Humans have to read it," Khusid said. At least for now.
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