EP106 AI as a Powerful Teammate in Product Management

I know you're out there interfacing with CTOs, CFOs, CEOs as well.

AI has become such a relevant and powerful tool for so many professionals.

Based on your observations, why has that happened over the last couple of years since we last spoke, do you think?

I think there's obviously two factors.

fundamental things.

Number one is the hype.

I mean, we're in a hype cycle.

You can't argue with that.

When companies are spending trillions of dollars on investing in this AI infrastructure, then of course they're going to be incredibly focused on encouraging people to use it.

And I think, you know, you'd be naive not to at least address that.

But I do believe, so the second thing is really, I do believe that AI is going to be almost as fundamental as the printing press.

Obviously, the printing press came out of Germany, I think, Jay, in the, what was it, the 1500s or something.

And it was the ability for effectively to print stuff.

So it went from people handwriting to people being able to mass produce information.

And that fundamentally changed, particularly European society.

And you could argue the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, loads of wars, the guillotine, which we don't want to talk about, the miserable.

All of these things came from the print.

And I know there was a lot more than just the printing press.

And I think AI is of that ill.

I don't know about you, Jay, but I use it extensively to help me do many things that I used to do.

um just manually which was very frustrating in fact this morning we were just doing a reconciliation financial reconciliation and it's just it used to take four hours and now we can do it in four minutes and what's even better is because it's there all the data's there we can then start asking it questions and those questions then lead us to other trains of thought and and and it's just an incredibly powerful tool It's not perfect.

It's not super smart, but it is incredibly useful.

So I honestly believe that this technology for knowledge work is going to be as fundamental as Henry Ford was for mass production, for

factory

work.