Many companies are still debating whether expensive AI subscriptions are worth it. Milo went on a different path.
Andrey Khusid, co-founder of Miro, maker of the popular online whiteboard platform, says his company provides employees with virtually unlimited access to the latest AI tools as a way to help them learn and work faster.
This approach is possible because Milo has been profitable since 2016, he said. The company has raised $476 million to date, and Kushid indicated he doesn’t expect to need any more capital.
Khushid positioned this expenditure as a core part of more traditional on-the-job training. “Our L&D budget is an unlimited tool,” he said.
Rather than asking employees to learn on their own time or at their own expense, Milo said he wants to experiment with it internally as a shared effort. He then added that there needs to be a clear business case for any tool purchase.
Miro’s strategy is part of a broader shift in technology where the adoption of AI is moving from being optional to expected. A new study from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish, based on data from more than 700 companies, finds that 64% now write the majority of their code with AI assistance. Tech giants like Google are encouraging employees to use AI tools more actively, and Microsoft is starting to tie its use to performance reviews. As a result, AI fluency is rapidly becoming a core skill in the workplace, rather than a nice-to-have.
Still, Kushid says many executives are asking the wrong questions about the ROI of AI. He said Milo is trying to focus on whether the company as a whole is accelerating movement, rather than judging tools on individual productivity gains or subscription costs.
The company tracks projects through a process he describes as “discover, define, deliver,” measuring the time it takes to move from one stage to the next. The goal is to compress that timeline as much as possible.
“The most important metric from my perspective is the speed of innovation,” Kushid said. “If you don’t innovate fast enough, you’re out of the game.”
Kushid said he doesn’t think the way companies use AI today will necessarily be the final state. It will take at least the end of this year, and possibly even next year, to see what the workplaces shaped by these tools will actually look like, he said. At that point, Miro will take a closer look at which tools are worth the price.
So far, Miro is already seeing time savings across engineering, product and design, he said. However, this is not always the case. He said that while better tools will speed up code generation, code reviews can still bog down projects.
“Humans have to read it,” Kushid said. At least for now.
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