Chris Nakashima

Chris Nakashima is an Engineering Manager at Retool, where he leads the team building Retool's AI-powered internal tool features — the ones that Retool's own customers use to build AI tools for their own teams. He has spent six years at the intersection of internal tooling and developer experience, which has given him an unusually detailed view of why some internal tools become indispensable and why most don't.

Over the past year, his team ran a 6-month study on AI tool adoption inside enterprise customers — tracking which AI-powered internal tools got used after launch, which ones got abandoned, and what the measurable differences were between the two groups. The findings were specific enough to be immediately actionable and different enough from conventional wisdom to be worth a talk.

At BuildWithAI Summit, Chris shares the full findings from that adoption study — the design decisions that drove adoption, the assumptions that led to abandonment, and the one thing his team stopped doing that changed their adoption rate more than anything else. A session for engineering managers and product teams who are building AI tools for internal users and want those tools to actually get used.