‘Be very good domain experts’: What Sridhar Vembu told Zoho engineers on surviving the AI era

Former Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has said that software engineers need to focus on domain expertise in order to thrive in the era of artificial intelligence. With the rise of new technology, Vembue stressed that programming skills still remain foundational, they are no longer enough on their own.

“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 wrote in a post on X

AI productivity gains are ‘hotly debated’:

While AI powered coding tools like Codex and Claude Code are being widely adopted across industries, Vembu says that the productivity gains from AI are still ‘hotly debated’ and instead urged his team to not obsess over programmer productivity and instead focus on how to offer a much better experience to customers using the power of AI.

“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.” Vembu noted

“That is why I advise our technical teams to not obsess about programmer productivity as a metric but focus on how we can offer a far better experience to customers using AI. There is a lot of needless or incidental complexity in software that can be eliminated by AI.” he added

The recent advice by Vembu comes just a couple of months after the 58 year old techie had stirred a controversy by suggesting that those ‘writing code for a living to start considering alternative livelihoods.’

He has also earlier warned that if the self worth of individuals is solely depedent on economic output, then AI could a serious threat to them. Vembu has also earlier noted that activities like caring for children or elderly, teaching and mentoring, farming, classical music and arts will remain largely unaffected even with AI coming into effect

Notably, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had famously said earlier in the year that he wants his engineers to stop coding at all and instead use AI tools like cursor as they focus their time on “undiscovered problems”.

“Nothing would give me more joy than if none of our engineers were coding at all,” Huang had said.

Huang has compared that shift to what happened to radiologists when AI became able to read medical scans. The Nvidia CEO noted that radiologists didn’t disappear but instead their numbers grew as they focused on higher level diagnosis rather than image analysis.