Vidya Chadaga
Battle-tested product leader. AI transformation practitioner.
San Francisco, California, United States
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Vidya Chadaga has spent 25+ years living at the intersection of SaaS and AI, building and scaling products that actually stick. She has led product, marketing, and GTM strategy across Fortune 100 companies and high-growth VC- and PE-backed SaaS firms, spanning enterprise and SMB markets in healthcare, logistics, fintech, and beyond.
What sets her apart is a rare dual lens: she has driven AI infusion and adoption from the inside, transforming how internal teams work, and from the outside, helping companies bring AI-powered products to market in ways customers embrace rather than ignore. She has held senior leadership roles at Cleo, RKD Group, Infusionsoft, and ThinkHR, and has advised product and engineering leaders across the SaaS spectrum on moving from GenAI experimentation to measurable business impact.
Vidya holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BS in Computer Science and Engineering.
She is a recurring conference speaker and a firm believer that the hardest part of any AI transformation is not the model. It is the humans.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Your AI Pilot Isn't Failing. Your Strategy Is.
Most companies are not short on AI enthusiasm. They are short on a framework to turn that enthusiasm into something real.
In this session, Vidya Chadaga introduces her original four-stage AI Maturity Model, built from hands-on advisory work across 20+ AI agent deployments in SaaS. The model maps where organizations actually are in their AI journey, from early Adopters experimenting with off-the-shelf copilots, to Extenders embedding AI into workflows, to Specialists training vertical models, to Originators building net-new AI products from scratch.
Most companies think they are further along than they are. That gap between perceived and actual maturity is exactly where strategies break down and pilots go to die.
You will leave this session knowing which stage your organization is in today, what the specific blockers look like at each stage, what it actually takes to move to the next one, and how to use this model to build a roadmap leadership will actually fund.
If you have ever wondered why your AI investments look great on slides but disappear in outcome discussions, this session is for you.
You Don't Have an AI Problem. You Have a Trust Problem.
The model works. The pilot looked promising. Then adoption flatlined and nobody can explain why.
This is the most common story in enterprise AI right now, and the culprit is almost never the technology. It is trust. Trust from end users who do not understand what the system is doing.
Trust across teams who do not agree on who owns what. Trust from customers who are skeptical of AI-driven experiences they did not ask for. Trust from partners who are unsure where the guardrails are. The hardest part of AI transformation is not the model. It is the belief that surrounds the entire ecosystem of a business.
In this session, Vidya draws on 25+ years of running SaaS products and driving AI infusion and adoption, both inside organizations and with their customers and partners, to break down why technology maturity and organizational ecosystem trust almost never move together, and what happens when they fall out of sync. She will walk through how to redesign roles rather than just automate tasks, what governance looks like in teams that are scaling AI successfully, how to bring customers and partners along so they become advocates rather than skeptics, and why the next leap in AI impact will come from earned belief across the full ecosystem, not more compute.
This is a session for product leaders and engineering managers who are tired of explaining to their boards why AI investments are not showing up in business outcomes, and who want a practical, human-centered path forward.
Per Seat Is Dead. Now What?
If you are pricing your AI product on a per-seat model, you may be slowly undermining your own value proposition. When your product replaces human labor, charging per head is self-defeating. When your LLM usage explodes with power users, flat subscriptions destroy your margins. And if you have launched credits without a clear definition of what a credit means to the customer, you are not alone, but you are leaving money on the table.
In this session, Vidya draws on 25+ years of building and monetizing SaaS products and driving AI infusion and adoption with customers and partners to break down the four pricing models reshaping the AI and SaaS landscape: outcome-based, labor replacement, consumption, and workflow automation. She pulls from real examples of what companies like Salesforce, Intercom, and Zendesk are learning in real time, what is working, what is backfiring, and where the market is heading as inference costs shift and usage patterns become harder to predict.
You will walk away with a sharper framework for tying your AI product's price to the value it actually delivers, a clearer way to think about the shift from software budgets to labor budgets, and a more honest conversation to have with your customers about what they are actually paying for and why.
Pricing AI is not just a finance problem. It is a trust problem, a positioning problem, and a customer relationship problem all at once. This session will help you untangle all three.
The B2B Product Growth Framework: Best Practices from Start-up to Scale-up
Building and scaling B2B products is no easy task, but having the right framework can make all the difference. In this session, I’ll walk you through a proven approach to taking products from a fresh idea to a full-blown market success. We’ll explore the key stages of the product lifecycle—from nailing product-market fit to launching and scaling up—and I’ll share practical do’s and don’ts for each step.
Did you know that 90% of new products fail because they don’t meet customer needs? This session will teach you how to avoid that fate by putting the customer at the center of your product decisions. You’ll also learn how to move from passion to a solid premise, properly prioritize what to build, and ultimately drive profits.
Real-world examples. Proven strategies. Quick wins. Even good notes to take back to your teams! Let’s turn your B2B product into the next big success.
Building the Right Team Topology: Blueprint for Teamwork and Trust
In this AI era, as a product steward, let AI handle data analysis, automate feedback insights, and predict user behavior—so you can focus on what matters most: vision, strategy, and leading your team. Behind every great product is an exceptional team, and as a product leader, it’s all about getting the team structure right. Join this session to equip yourself with proven org design ideas that have driven success in high-growth companies.
What’s the big takeaway? Trust, empathy, and collaboration are the secret ingredients.
Product teams with the right topology are deeply aligned on value, vision, and viability—working effortlessly and in sync. I’ll walk you through three distinct organizational designs tailored to balance core, primary, and secondary product functions across different stages—whether you're an early startup, in growth mode, or scaling up. You’ll leave with practical strategies to build a high-performing team without breaking the bank, plus a few key tactics that any product team can use. Ready to level up your team?
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