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HS Hector Serrano On Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

“If we, as an AI company that enables humans to do better work, go out and start making AI slop ads and videos with AI influencers and AI designs and AI statics, it's probably not going to be received really well. It looks off. I think it goes towards not automating the work that's going to be the final product people are looking at. The risk versus reward is not worth it.”

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · In-Depth Interviews · November 2026

“If we, as an AI company that enables humans to do better work, go out and start making AI slop ads and videos with AI influencers and AI designs and AI statics, it's probably not going to be received really well. It looks off. I think it goes towards not automating the work that's going to be the final product people are looking at. The risk versus reward is not worth it.” — Hector Serrano, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Context

Asked how much of the company's content work could be automated with AI, he says the final assets are still made by teams of humans, and argues an AI company looks bad shipping AI-generated creative.

Transcript

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth Around 56:58 into the episode
Hector Serrano

…at Lemine Yamal, like just won the World Cup at what, 19 years old, 18 years old. And I think that same approach can be applied to the startup world. Like find young talent, invest in them, let them get real reps in the real world. And then eventually they'll might become one of your A players.

Lenny Rachitsky

…that you do, which is really interesting because it's, you know, that's all anyone talks about these days. And you actually had this tweet the other day, the best marketers are allergic to AI. Talk about just what you, what you think with how AI plays into this and how AI should not play into this.

Hector Serrano

I just think like overall, when you look at a lot of the work done, like even like looking at the top labs, like they are some of the people that have the most amount of humans actually working on a specific asset. And like maybe, yes, they have a lot of the research automated or a lot of different steps like internally automated, but the actual production of the asset, whether it comes to the video, the design and Figma, the editing, the post-production, et cetera, it's all done by teams of a lot of humans. And I think there's not going to be a real way to get around that, at least not anytime soon. And especially in like the environment we're in now where a lot of people are very, I guess, turned off by AI and it can be a scary thing to talk about. If you're an AI company like Whisper, who In theory, we enable humans to do better work. We don't want to replace anyone's job. We want to give them, I guess, the tools to be able to be more productive, to do more work, and to sound more naturally and to sound like themselves more naturally. If we on the other side go out and start making AI slop ads and videos with AI influencers and I don't know, AI designs…

Lenny Rachitsky

So the alpha, what I'm hearing here is like, don't use AI for this work.

Hector Serrano

Yeah, for the final output, especially on the creative side, like what other people are going to see, I don't think AI should touch. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky

That is really interesting. Like, you know, people, it feels like everyone's hearing lean into AI. Even one of the

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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