Kartik Ramakrishnan

📌 Health, experimentation, and shipping faster: here's what I'm focusing on in 2026 📌 As we enter 2026, I want to reflect on last year and express gratitude to everyone who made it meaningful. To my family, my colleagues at Amazon, and the startup founders and technopreneurs I connected with, for their support, inspiring conversations and shared learning. Health is my #1 priority this year. Without it, I can't show up fully for my two young daughters, my team, or our customers. I'm committed to finding time for healthy eating and exercise, even while balancing the demands of parenting and career. It's not easy, but it's non-negotiable. With that foundation, here's where I'm focusing my energy professionally in 2026. 1️⃣ First, fostering a culture of strategic experimentation. AI technology is still evolving, and we don't yet know its full potential or gaps. I'm taking a pragmatic approach: testing it on a handful of well-defined customer problems with clear goals in mind. I want to encourage my teams to experiment, but with constraints and intention. If something doesn't work, we pivot quickly without falling into the sunk cost fallacy. This is where Amazon's leadership principles of Learn and Be Curious, Bias for Action and Are Right a Lot come together. We think carefully, move decisively, and treat these as two-way door decisions. Learning by doing is how we'll discover what truly works. 2️⃣ Second, once those experiments prove valuable, shipping production-grade code faster. My biggest frustration in 2025 was having PRFAQs and BRDs ready but waiting on dev resources to bring them to life. We will continue to leverage AI coding assistants combined with robust software development practices to solve this bottleneck. I've been reading a few great resources - "How Big Things Get Done", "Diving into system design on AWS", and working through "The DevOps Handbook" to ensure we're building on solid fundamentals, not just moving fast for the sake of speed. 2026 will be the year AI experiments face real ROI scrutiny, which means we need to work backwards from goals and outcomes, not from the technology itself. Think slow during experimentation, move fast when shipping. 3️⃣ Third, helping my team unlock their potential. In an environment where the pressure to deliver is constant, I want to create space for people to be builders, tinkerers, and experimenters. Celebrate failures and learnings along with success. This ties back to that measured Bias for Action approach: taking smart risks on reversible decisions, learning what works, and iterating. When we empower people to experiment and learn by doing, that's when real innovation, beyond what we can imagine today, truly happens.

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I talked to Nick Bloom about why 75% of companies are using AI and the productivity gain is still zero. His framework helped explain what many of us may be feeling. New essay. https://lnkd.in/gtkWtjy5

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AI is the great equalizer with global adoption happening without traditional localization. It was great catching up with John Cook at the GeekWire + Accenture event in Bellevue. The conversation started with a discussion Read AI's journey from idea to #9 AI vendor amongst Brex customers, and evolved to what makes this AI boom different from past booms. + Human psychology is shaping AI deployment (there is a case where the response is too fast) + Successful adoption of AI agents require solving specific problems + Multiplayer AI will unlock more value + Digital twins are set to go mainstream in 2026 https://lnkd.in/giPHh2-p

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Scale requires trust, and building trust means meeting people exactly where they are. As we continue to grow Waymo, now delivering over half a million trips a week, we know that navigating the era of AI comes with a healthy, natural skepticism. People want to know the "why" behind the technology. That’s why today is such a proud milestone for our team as we launch our first-ever national brand campaign. And awesome to have it air during the first US World Cup game tonight in LA!!! 🇺🇸 🇵🇾 ⚽ With this campaign, we want to open up a conversation about who we are doing this for... It's about our riders, the drivers with whom we share the road, cyclists, pedestrians, and the communities we serve. We build this technology and grow this service not because humans aren’t enough, but because to us, they’re everything. I've personally got a bunch of "Becauses". The opportunity to help more people make it safely home. 🚘 The opportunity to have my aging parents have a safer option when they need to get to a medical appointment. 👴 👵 The opportunity for my kids to meet the world without having to worry about getting a driver's license. 🪪 And the opportunity to just jam out more to amazing music in the backseat with friends. 🎵 This campaign is an invitation to connect with our mission on a deeper, more human level. And as we look to the future, we want to hear from you: raise your hand and let us know where you want to see the Waymo Driver next. 🤩 A massive thank you to our phenomenal team for bringing this vision to life with so much creativity, care, heart, and sleepless nights. 😍 💚 💙 Watch the film below and let me know your thoughts. 👇

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