LinkedIn’s Engineering CTO on Building AI-Native Products in 2026

LinkedIn CTO Erran Berger argues that building AI-native products requires shifting from traditional feature development to continuous improvement loops where quality is refined through constant iteration. He emphasizes the importance of building custom evaluation frameworks and ensuring that technical model improvements translate into meaningful business outcomes. Ultimately, he suggests that a company's true competitive advantage lies in its ability to leverage proprietary data and existing recommendation systems as a specialized "harness" for AI models.