The AI pilot worked. The demo impressed everyone. So why is the rollout stalling eight months later? Most companies answer with a purchase order – a bigger model, a second vendor. This talk makes the opposite case. A stalled pilot has already proved the technology; what’s left to fix is the organization, and no purchase fixes that.
Mirza Besirovic scaled Zendesk’s AI agents from pilot to past $100M ARR and has seen the stall from both sides, as the vendor and as the operator whose own org had to change. He shows the costs that stayed invisible for 18 months, and the organizational redesign that did more than any model upgrade.
Director of Product, AI Agents at Zendesk.
Mirza Beširović is Director of Product for AI Agents at Zendesk, where he leads the platform behind multi-agent systems automating millions of customer conversations for brands including Netflix, Vimeo, and Levi’s. With a background in linguistics and years spent building conversational AI, he now works where agentic architecture meets commercial scale and organizational change – building systems that don’t just respond, but act, and helping companies figure out what AI-first actually demands. He writes the newsletter You Are The Product and speaks about agentic product strategy and the evolving role of product leadership in autonomous systems.
