HP President on Replacing Middle Management with AI Agents | Faisal Masud | E314
HP is best known for hardware and printers. Faisal Masud is turning it into a software and AI company, and he thinks the era of stacked management layers is ending. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Faisal Masud, SVP and President of Worldwide Digital Services at HP, for a candid conversation about building enterprise AI, and what it does to how companies are actually run.Faisal has a rare vantage point: two decades across Amazon, eBay, Groupon, and Alphabet's Wing (the drone delivery moonshot, where he was COO), then CEO of the $1.5B commerce platform fabric, and now running all of HP's commercial software business. He explains why a hardware giant deliberately built a standalone software unit, how the thesis (collect telemetry from HP's devices, turn it into insights that serve customers) became the Workforce Experience Platform, and why HP stopped reselling third-party software to sell its own owned-IP products instead.
The heart of the conversation is what AI is doing to organizations. Faisal argues that AI is demonstrably making extra layers of management unnecessary, because the monitoring, data collection, and aggregation those layers existed to do can now be handled by individuals and agents. His provocative framing: the future "manager" is managing agents, not people, and managers will have to know far more than just how to manage. He's equally blunt about the hype, AI is part of your strategy, not your strategy, adoption metrics alone prove nothing, and "everything is easier with AI until you go to production, which is a whole different ball game," where token budgets and real ROI bite. He also gives a working leader's read on the competitive landscape (OpenAI on the frontier, Amazon's moat, Microsoft Copilot's gains) and how his own PMs and developers use Claude, Codex, and Cloud Code every day.
What you'll learn:
- Why AI is making additional layers of management unnecessary, and what replaces them
-- The shift from managing people to managing agents, and why managers will need to know more
- Why a hardware company like HP built a standalone software and AI business
- How device- and OS-agnostic telemetry became the Workforce Experience Platform
- Why HP stopped reselling third-party software to sell owned-IP products
- Why "AI is part of your strategy, not your strategy," and why adoption metrics aren't enough
- The real wall: AI makes building easy until you hit production, budgets, and token limits
- How Faisal pushes PMs on what should be done with AI vs. what needs a human in the loop
- A working read on OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft Copilot in the enterprise
- What Faisal predicts for headcount and org structure in the mid-term
Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:50 Intro: Carlos welcomes Faisal Masud, President of HP Digital Services
01:48 Welcome, and Faisal's "very complicated" title explained
02:15 Why HP (hardware and printers) expanded into software
03:05 From Amazon, eBay, and Alphabet's Wing to SaaS "by accident"
04:18 His tweets, and why AI FOMO is off the charts
06:03 Pushing a team all-in on AI, and getting through the slop
06:31 AI's dominant role in the enterprise: inform and consult
08:01 The flood of AI tools, and cutting through the noise
08:51 The AI layer being built on top of SaaS
09:19 HP on the OpenAI frontier, and reading the model landscape
10:52 HP's own role: AI for internal workflows
11:07 How PMs are pushed on AI vs. human in the loop
12:19 Moving fast on AI inside a large enterprise
14:39 The blood, sweat, and tears behind Workforce Experience
16:00 Go-to-market: leveraging HP's existing relationships
16:14 From a point solution to a device- and OS-agnostic platform
17:29 From reselling third-party software to owned-IP products
18:16 The CIO's question: how close are you to the outcome?
18:37 Dogfooding across 80,000 employees to earn trust
20:41 "If we can't provide ROI, we shouldn't exist"
21:30 What AI does to headcount and management layers
23:37 The hard part: who manages a fleet of agents?
25:28 What agents do to the SaaS pricing model
27:15 The market shift: only what's accretive survives
27:57 "No more dashboards": why AI feels liberating
30:11 Wrap-up
Connect with Faisal Masud: President, HP
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faisal/
Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/
About HP Digital Services: HP's Digital Services division builds the commercial software HP sells into enterprises and channel partners, including the Workforce Experience Platform, which uses AI to anticipate and resolve employees' IT needs across a device- and OS-agnostic fleet.
About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech. Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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