Brian Sparker

I’m a product leader working at the intersection of AI, search, and developer platforms. Most of my career has focused on taking emerging technologies that are still rough around the edges and turning them into real products people can use.

The thread that runs through my work is simple: rapid experimentation, followed by platformization. I believe the fastest way to discover what AI is actually good for is to build quickly, test ideas in the real world, and then turn the things that work into reliable systems others can build on.

Today I’m a Senior Product Manager at You.com, where I help lead the development of the company’s AI platform. My work has spanned generative AI, retrieval systems, and agent workflows, with a focus on translating state-of-the-art model capabilities into production systems used by millions of users and developers. That includes everything from defining evaluation frameworks for model quality, to designing APIs and developer tools, to launching usage-based platforms that enable partners to build on top of our infrastructure.

Earlier in my career, I worked on large-scale machine learning systems in commerce and discovery. At Crate & Barrel I led the transition from rules-based search and ranking to ML-powered personalization across tens of millions of monthly shopping sessions, delivering measurable gains in conversion and revenue. At G2 I built NLP-driven systems that helped users understand large volumes of software reviews through automated summarization and insights.

Across these roles I’ve consistently been drawn to the same type of problems: systems where software, data, and user behavior interact in complex ways, and where the goal is not just to ship features but to design the underlying capabilities that make entire classes of products possible.

Recently my work has focused on the next shift in computing: agent-driven software and AI-native developer ecosystems. As software agents begin to interact with APIs, tools, and services on behalf of users, many of the assumptions behind traditional software interfaces start to change. I’m particularly interested in how search, knowledge retrieval, and APIs evolve in a world where the primary “user” may increasingly be another piece of software.

Outside of my day job, I spend a lot of time building prototypes and small tools to explore new ideas in AI systems. These projects help me test emerging capabilities quickly and better understand where the real opportunities are. Sometimes they turn into products, sometimes they turn into open source experiments, and sometimes they simply sharpen my understanding of how the technology is evolving.

At a high level, my work sits at the intersection of three things:

• discovering new AI capabilities through rapid prototyping

• turning successful experiments into scalable platforms

• enabling developers and partners to build new products on top of those systems

I’m excited about the future of AI not just because of the models themselves, but because of the entirely new kinds of software ecosystems they’re enabling.

If you’re working on something interesting in this space, feel free to reach out.