Today we have two guests from two different companies who have one shared conviction: AI works best when it amplifies people, not replaces them. Today we’re joined by Rachana Rele, VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe, and David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Read AI. Together, they’re building very different products — but they share a vision of AI that removes the drudgery from creative work and makes room for the thinking that actually matters.
In this conversation, we dig into some ideas that could genuinely change how you think about your work. David talks about this concept of “storage of intelligence” — the idea that your knowledge, your meeting history, your working style could all be captured and made available as a kind of digital twin that keeps working even when you’re not in the room. And Rachana shares how Adobe is thinking about AI not as a one-shot creative output machine, but as a collaborative partner that helps teams break out of their own blind spots.
We also push them on the harder questions — the job anxiety that’s real right now in tech, the surveillance concerns that come with recording your work life, and where they each personally draw the line.
Bios
David Shim is Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, an AI productivity platform focused on helping knowledge workers leverage the power of AI to improve how they collaborate, communicate, and get work done. The platform provides meeting insights, search, chat, and proactive recommendations for millions of professionals, integrating seamlessly with the tools teams already use. Read AI is pioneering the concept of the Digital Twin—AI that serves as a true extension of you, built on deep contextual understanding of how you work.
Today, Read AI is trusted by teams at 90% of the Fortune 500 and in the past year, was recognized as a Top 10 AI Vendor for Enterprises by Brex, a Top 50 AI App by a16z and Mercury, and named one of Inc.’s Top 16 Companies to Watch
Before founding Read AI, David served as CEO of Foursquare and previously founded Placed, which was acquired by Snap in 2017. In 2025, he was named CEO of the Year by Geekwire.
Rachana Rele
Rachana has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology and human experience — figuring out not just what to build, but why it matters. At Adobe, she shapes the direction of new products, nurtures ideas from zero to something real, and helps early-stage businesses find their footing and grow.
She’s also a perpetual student — currently finishing an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, with an M.Eng. in HCI from Clemson and a B.E. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Mumbai.
About Read AI
Read AI started as a meeting notetaker, but it’s grown into something closer to a team intelligence layer. It captures what happens in your meetings and connects that context to the tools your team already lives in — Notion, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Teams, and more — so institutional knowledge stops disappearing into calendar invites.
The newest piece is Ada, an AI executive assistant that lives in your email. CC ada@read.ai on a thread and Ada handles scheduling, surfaces relevant context from past meetings, and follows up on action items — checking with you before sending anything substantive. No new app, no onboarding for external collaborators. It’s particularly useful for design and product teams juggling multiple projects and time zones, where coordination overhead tends to quietly eat the day.
A few recent milestones worth noting: Ada is now live for all 5M+ users (the largest digital twin deployment to date), and Read AI just launched an MCP server and open API — meaning your meeting data can now flow directly into Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools your team uses to do the actual work.
