Skip to content
Case study / Linktree

AI that survives 70 million users.

Taking AI features from demo to production at scale: evaluation before release, humans accountable for the output, and a growth curve the business could rely on.

Industry
Creator platform
Focus
AI product delivery · Evaluation and guardrails · Engineering practice
Role
Head of Grow Engineering
The numbers
80%Fewer P1 cyber security incidents
WeeklyRelease cadence, with evaluation in front
~25%Less delivery time on medium-sized work
ZeroDowntime on the platform migration

The problem

Everyone can build an AI demo. Very few can put one in front of millions of users and stand behind what it says.

The gap is not the model. It is everything around it: knowing whether a change made the feature better or worse, catching the bad answer before a customer sees it, and being able to ship weekly without holding your breath each time.

Where we came inHead of Grow Engineering, accountable for the AI features the business grows on and for the practice that puts them in front of users safely.

What we did

  1. Made AI features testable before releaseAn evaluation framework, so every AI feature is measured against real cases before it ships rather than judged by whoever tried it last. The team can answer “is this version better?” with evidence instead of opinion.
  2. Scaled an agentic product to half a million usersTwo teams, led through their managers, took agentic AI insights and peer-to-peer messaging from twenty thousand to five hundred thousand monthly active users in three months, and kept it reliable enough to leave running.
  3. Put AI inside how the team works, not just the productImplementation moved to AI tooling with engineers owning problem definition, review and verification. Delivery time on medium-sized work dropped by roughly a quarter. The judgement stayed with people; the typing did not.
The Linktree home page: “A link in bio built for you”, with a claim of 70M+ people using it, beside a photograph of the creator Zay Dante next to a phone showing his own Linktree.

What changed

Two companies became one platform and customers did not notice. An entire user base migrated with zero downtime, with unified billing and login behind it. The AI features that drove growth went out on a weekly cadence with evaluation in front of them.

What this means for youAI in production is an engineering discipline problem wearing a machine learning costume. The teams that win are the ones who can tell whether last week’s change helped.

The Plann and Linktree teams have been extremely fortunate to have such a smart and genuinely caring leader at the helm. I’ll miss our open and candid weekly chats.

Wayne LincolnEngineering Manager, Linktree

More of where we’ve worked

Not sure where your version of this starts?

Thirty minutes to work out what’s worth doing, and what isn’t.

Book a discovery call (opens in a new tab)