David Hsu on AI capabilities
From Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO · · Product School
“And I think that uh, from a uh, is it going to happen perspective, it's from a sort of business economics perspective, absolutely. And then you ask, you know, from a technological perspective, are we there? And I think we're basically there at this point. My thesis is that LLMs are really, really quite smart. And uh, if you uh, if I were to ask an LLM anything honestly, uh, an LLM is probably better than I am at any knowledge task at this point, any individual knowledge task. Uh, but the question is, you know, why is it not effective as an AI employee? Why, you know, why is it not replacing me wholesale yet? And I think the answer is that it doesn't have arms and legs right now. It doesn't have the ability to actually go do things in your business. And that's what uh, our agents product is all about, is how do we give arms and legs to uh, LLMs so they can actually do things in your business. But to me, it is an inevitable future, and I'm really excited about it.”
On , David Hsu, CEO & Co-Founder at Retool, spoke about AI capabilities during Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO on Product School.
About David Hsu
David Hsu, CEO and co-founder of Retool, appeared in a session on April 1, 2026, discussing the company's focus on enabling non-engineers to build internal applications and AI agents. He stated that Retool connects to data across various sources without storing it, a capability he said has attracted customers including the US Air Force, US Navy, US Army, and Coinbase. Hsu also described a strategic shift, saying the company is considering "a very high conviction bet to totally rearchitect our product" and move toward letting large language models generate code on the platform rather than using drag-and-drop frameworks. Hsu predicted that autonomous agents replacing human work is a "business economic inevitability" by 2028, citing pressure to optimize labor costs. He contrasted this with what he described as unsustainable growth in some AI companies, giving the example of a live coding firm with over $100 million in revenue but gross retention around 55%, suggesting such companies "will be gone in a few years without sustainable use cases." Hsu emphasized the importance of hands-on building, noting that he personally experiments with tools like Boltbox and that product leaders must iterate to avoid being reinvented by competitors.