Kushal Sharma leads the internal AI organization at Circle, the community platform where creators and brands build communities, courses and digital businesses. He joined Circle in 2024 to run a combined data and revenue operations function, and spent two years putting real architecture underneath the go-to-market motion: medallion layers, a dbt semantic layer, orchestration the team controls outright, and lineage on everything. That foundation is what let Circle stand up an AI function when agents and skills actually shipped — including an AI SDR that has generated close to seven figures in revenue. Before Circle he spent roughly eight and a half years at Hootsuite, where he led the company's data organization.
“One of the biggest things that I do as a person leading a team with a lot of technical things and a lot of go-to-market data infrastructure is that we keep a lot of our core business pieces under our control so that we never suffer from a vendor lock-in.”
“It's just people that have been there around long enough to know what it is, and if they leave, that there goes all your knowledge with them.”
“What a human understands really well is likely what an AI will understand. So if you read that semantic data and if you don't get clarity from it as to what it actually is, neither will your AI.”
“So over time, you don't have to invest in AI tech. You just keep updating your semantic data. You keep updating your skill files and your agents just get smarter and smarter with time.”
“You can't get to scale and then reverse engineer this whole thing.”
“A large language model is not a store of knowledge. It appears to be like that because ChatGPT seems to know everything, but it is a language generator.”
“A lot of this is actually traditional software. You're not invoking an LLM at every layer. All of this is traditional software, which is great news because it is cheap, it is repeatable and it is reliable.”
“Don't let it go to 20,000 transcripts before you think of a vector database. But you don't wanna worry about it at 20 either.”