Benjamin Pollack
NowHead of Product, Sanai · AI for Pharma · San Francisco

Notes on building software
where being wrong has consequences.

I am a product leader working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and regulated industry — currently shipping pharmaceutical AI at Sanai. Before that: a founder, a director of consumer AI, and, for seven years, a builder of large public art installations. This site is mostly an essay habit.

Based
San Francisco <> Berlin
Writing since
2019 — ~70 essays
Ben Pollack

I have spent the last fifteen years building things that other people use to do consequential work — first as a founder of a custom-fabrication studio that put twenty-foot interactive sculptures in the lobbies of Hilton, Hard Rock Cafe, and Uber, then as a product leader inside three AI companies of varying scale.

What links those two lives, for me, is the same problem in different costumes: how do you build something that an institution will trust enough to put in front of its customers, its regulators, or its city council? The answer is almost never a feature. It is almost always a posture.

I write because the discipline of writing forces me to figure out what I actually believe. Most of what is here is an attempt to convert pattern-recognition into something I can hand to the next person who has to do this job.

Recent writing

Selected · 2025 — 2026

Now

Updated Apr 2026

Leading product at Sanai, where we are building the document-intelligence and data-ingestion layer that pharmaceutical companies actually trust enough to put in front of regulators.

Writing an essay every two to three weeks, mostly on the unglamorous craft of shipping AI inside institutions that have liability. Slowly drafting a longer piece on the failure of GameForge.

Outside of work: snowboarding badly, reading widely, returning to large-format installation art on weekends.