AI technology has seen a meteoric rise in the past several years, and by now it’s far from being a novelty in product development. In fact, according to McKinsey’s
research, 72% of organizations in 2024 were already using AI in at least one business function.
From early-stage market research to workflow automation and user personalization, it’s clear that AI can supercharge how companies build and enhance their services. But while the hype is justified in many ways, there’s a growing risk of overreliance.
AI is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used in many ways, but it is still just an assistant rather than a master planner. It helps us build better and faster, yes — but it shouldn’t be the one deciding what we’re building, why it matters, or where
we’re headed.
Where AI Can Shine
Let’s start with something positive. If we’re talking about product development, there are at least areas where AI can drive real efficiency and unlock new value.
Market Evaluation at Speed
For many years, market research — whether for fresh startups or already established companies — used to mean weeks of manual information gathering and data crunching.
Today, with the use of generative AI, product teams can rapidly analyze customer conversations across support chats or social media, segment markets by specific factors, or even simulate user personas to test how different people might interact with a product.
As a result, the work of weeks gets reduced to days, if not hours.
Automating the Repetitive Stuff
Whether it’s drafting documents, summarizing meeting notes, or generating progress reports, AI is an ideal tool for streamlining internal workflows.
Such tasks don’t require a lot of creativity, but they do eat up a lot of time. Outsourcing them to artificial intelligence allows team members to focus their energy on the things that actually require human thinking to move the product forward.
Smarter Decision Support
AI-based predictive models can offer insight into a wide range of product decisions by analyzing vast amounts of historical and real-time data, uncovering trends and signals that may not be immediately visible to human teams.
Identifying optimal price points for products and services, forecasting which features are likely to see the most engagement, spotting early signs of customer outflow — the possibilities are many.
Where Human Judgment Must Stay in Charge
But even with all of the above, there are still areas where human insight, creativity, and empathy must lead. And that is likely to remain just as true in the future.
Strategy Development
AI can gather data and point out emerging patterns and trends to you, but it can’t tell you which of these trends is truly worth staking the future of your business on. That’s a strategic choice any leader has to make on their own, based on their experience,
market understanding, and long-term goals. Your vision for the future is unique, and no algorithmic output can decide it for you.
Long-Term Product Vision
The same is true for your product vision. It’s more than just a roadmap or a set of features — it’s a representation of how you see the future of your target market and your role in shaping it. What problems do you think are worth solving? What kind of change
do you want to lead? AI can analyze historical patterns and help predict possible market shifts, but it doesn’t have the conviction to make a choice and stand for it in your place.
Ethical Decision-Making
As product leaders, we don’t just build products in a vacuum — we build for real people who will be using those products. And all those people have diverse backgrounds, needs, and vulnerabilities.
And now that AI has become such a prominent factor in just about any industry you look at, the ethical stakes are higher than ever. Even ethics committees are
wrestling to figure out what role it should play in decision-making. The consensus so far seems to be clear: while AI can provide input, it cannot be the final arbiter of what is right or wrong. It simply doesn’t have the moral judgment capabilities to
perform such functions. It doesn’t understand fairness, or dignity, or harm in a meaningful way.
Which is why the responsibility for building products that respect people’s rights and serve society ultimately sits with us.
Let AI Help You Build — Don’t Let It Decide What’s Worth Building.
If you’re building products today, AI should absolutely be part of your toolkit. But it’s not a substitute for product thinking. It doesn’t know your users like you do. It doesn’t care about your company’s mission. And it certainly doesn’t take responsibility
when things go wrong.
In short: human creativity and sense of judgment aren’t becoming outdated anytime soon.
