Zara Haddad

Zara Haddad leads AI product at Halden, the customer support platform behind the help desks of around twelve thousand companies. She shipped Halden’s first AI reply assistant in 2024 and has since taken it through two model changes, one public apology and a redesign that put support agents, not the model, back in charge of what customers see.

Zara trained as a linguist and worked on machine translation before moving into product, which left her suspicious of any demo that only works in English. She lives in Amsterdam Noord, commutes by ferry, and is learning to sail on the IJsselmeer with mixed results.