Every product org I walk into right now has the same conversation happening somewhere: "How should we be using AI?" Usually it's framed as a technology question. It's not. It's a prioritisation question, and that makes it a product management problem.
Where AI is genuinely changing how I work: requirements analysis. I can feed an AI a messy Confluence page, three Slack threads, and a recording transcript, and get a structured brief back in minutes. It doesn't replace the thinking, I still have to decide what matters, but it compresses the synthesis work dramatically. What used to take me a morning now takes thirty minutes.
Stakeholder communication. First drafts of status updates, decision logs, even tricky emails where tone matters. AI gets me eighty percent of the way there. I edit, sharpen, and send. The time saving across a week is significant when you're managing multiple workstreams.
Data interrogation. When I need to understand what's happening in a dataset before a planning session, AI lets me ask questions in plain English and get answers I'd previously have waited two days for an analyst to pull. I'm not replacing the analyst, I'm arriving at the conversation with better questions.
Where it still falls short: strategy. I've seen teams ask AI to generate product strategies, roadmap priorities, even OKRs. The output looks polished and sounds reasonable. That's exactly the problem. It pattern-matches against what a strategy document should look like without understanding your market, your constraints, your team's actual capacity, or the politics that will determine whether anything ships. A convincing-looking strategy that nobody believes in is worse than no strategy at all.
The other trap is using AI outputs without editing them. The moment your stakeholders start recognising the AI voice in your documents, the slightly over-structured paragraphs, the generic confidence, you've lost credibility. AI should be invisible in your output. If people can tell you used it, you didn't use it well enough.
The product leaders who are getting this right treat AI as leverage on execution, not a shortcut on judgment. The thinking is still yours. The decisions are still yours. AI just means you spend less time on the admin around those decisions and more time on the decisions themselves.