The Tech Trek · 2026-06-18 · 26 min
Yahoo is not just adding AI on top of existing products. It is using AI across product experiences, internal tools, engineering workflows, and modernization efforts. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Lee Zen, CTO at Yahoo, joins Amir Bormand to talk about modernizing at massive scale, moving from on prem infrastructure to the cloud, rebuilding internal tools with AI, and how engineering organizations need to rethink process when agents can move faster than people. Lee also shares how Yahoo views AI as a coworker, not just a tool, and why the next bottleneck in software delivery may be human judgment. Practical Takeaways • Modernization at scale often means operating in two worlds at once, keeping proven systems running while new cloud based services move faster. • AI can help teams move past legacy tools by reverse engineering requirements and rebuilding modern versions from scratch. • The real unlock is not only code generation. It is connecting agents to documents, chats, emails, production context, and internal knowledge with the right permissions. • As agents speed up execution, engineering teams need to rethink where human approval, judgment, and review should live.
Engineers Are Becoming AI Orchestrators69 / 100Your Team Is Using AI AnywayWhat AI Agents Need Before ProductionWhy AI Founders Need to Say No FasterWhy Sovereign AI Matters Now