Ziyad Basheer

I'm Ziyad, a product designer and engineer, and the founder and CEO of Aide, an AI company based in Toronto.

Aide is an agentic AI customer operations platform trusted by CX teams across finance, e-commerce, education, healthcare, and hardware. It automates everything from triage to end-to-end resolution and conversational intelligence, all while giving human agents the context, tooling, and guidance to do their best work, and turning the support queue into a roadmap for a better product. We've been building applied AI products since GPT-3, through Claude and beyond, and we're backed by investors from Silicon Valley and Canada including SV Angel, Village Global, and Garage Capital.

Before Aide, I spent the first part of my career building products from 0 to 1. I worked as a product designer and engineer across startups, agencies, and institutions, designing a new book-browsing interface with the Open Library team at the Internet Archive, leading product alongside founders at early-stage startups (including ZipSchool, now buildspace), and designing GoTravel, a border-monitoring and counter-terrorism tool, with the United Nations OICT. I got my start in user research at UXBERT Labs, the first UX and usability lab in Saudi Arabia.

I've been a tinkerer and entrepreneur for as long as I can remember, drawing hardware diagrams, building PCs, and trading in-game goods for cash in primary school. That curiosity pulled me through every layer of technology, from how data crosses the planet, so I started from learning networking to application design how interfaces put humans at the center. What I care about most lives where design and engineering meet: the craft of software, the interfaces we build, and the tools we use to think and create.

This site is where I write some of that down. Recurring threads include web vs. native applications, composable interfaces, tools and thought, and how we organize information and memory. I also built Immigrant Founders.

Elsewhere

You can find me on X and LinkedIn — or just email me at ziyad [at] ziyadbasheer [dot] com.