Andrei Negrau

Andrei Negrau is the co-founder and CEO of Siena AI, an autonomous customer service platform built for commerce. For some of the brands running it, Siena handles 60 to 80 percent of support interactions. His argument is that the automation is the least interesting part. He points to a CPG brand that kept seeing customers ask for smaller sizes in support conversations, built a sample version of every product, and generated millions in sample sales in 2025, before counting anyone who upgraded to the full size.

He grew up in Romania and first came to the US for a summer job, where he got hooked on the idea that customer service is a growth engine rather than a cost centre. He carried that into the ecommerce brands he ran, sold one, and moved into software. He founded the conversational commerce company Cartloop in 2020, then co-founded Siena AI with Lisa Popovici, which he says was among the first companies to ship an autonomous CX agent powered by large language models. Siena works with Shopify brands including HexClad, K18, Kitsch, and Simple Modern.

His position is that "AI native" describes a philosophy of running a company, not a set of tools, and that the most valuable data most brands own is sitting unread in their support conversations. Siena Intelligence and its agent, Ask Siena, which he calls Claude Code for CX, sit on top of conversation, review, social, and Shopify data. His test for choosing between AI tools is blunt. The models are roughly equivalent now, so the only thing that matters is what context a tool can actually see.

He lives in New York City. He played football competitively as a kid in Romania, shoots photography under the name Andrei Walks, and writes essays on his own site when something won't leave him alone.