Derya Isler

Derya Isler is VP of AI at Salesforce, where she leads the AI platform powering enterprise-scale agentic products. She is the author of Strategic AI Product Leadership, a practitioner's guide for AI product teams who want to build products that actually get better over time.

Through her advisory practice, she partners with Fortune 500 companies to transform how they approach AI, helping leadership teams move from scattered AI experiments to coherent, production-ready agentic systems.

Before Salesforce, she led AI teams at Meta (Instagram Reels) and Spotify, where her team built the algorithms behind Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. Fifteen years of building AI products in production, across e-commerce, media, and financial services, inform everything she teaches and writes.

She also teaches AI and product management as an adjunct professor at Boston College and advises startups through several accelerator programs and is an advisor at Glasswing Ventures.

Her central argument: most AI products are deployed, not learned. The ones that compound, that get measurably better with every user interaction, are built differently from the start. That is what this book is about.