Your AI Doesn't Have a Feature Problem. It Has an Adoption Problem. | Charanya Kannan (Navan)

September 29th, 2026

29 mins 16 secs

Season 2

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About this Episode

Every product team is shipping AI. But the dirty secret is that, for many companies, very few users are adopting. The feature launches, the people who try it love it, and adoption stalls anyway.

Our guest today thinks that's because teams obsess over building AI and barely think about adoption. Charanya Kannan is VP and GM of Navan Anywhere, which puts Navan's AI travel and expense tools inside Slack, Teams, and Gemini, where people already work, instead of asking them to open another app.

She joined Navan when the company was still called TripActions and doing under $50 million in revenue... now it's well on its way to a billion.

Her take: if customers have to work harder to use your AI, it isn't actually better.

In this episode, Charanya shares:

  • How Navan Anywhere was built distribution-first, bringing booking and expenses into the tools people already use every day
  • Why Navan's margins went up in the AI era, while the rest of SaaS braces for compression
  • And why she believes PMs who mostly manage process and Jira tickets will fade away, while those who can actually drive user benefit and business outcomes will matter more than ever

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetcharanya/
Navan: https://navan.com/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
04:17 Why AI features don't always get adopted
06:30 Building Navan Anywhere distribution-first
10:13 When to use AI vs. deterministic systems
12:01 Conversational cognitive load and why good UI still matters
15:57 Evals, distilled models, and the AI reliability pyramid
20:14 Product owners vs. product managers in the AI era
26:10 How Navan is growing margins while SaaS faces AI compression
31:40 Conclusion

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