To successfully automate complex workflows with AI, product teams must go beyond traditional discovery. A "forward-deployed PM" works on-site with customers, directly observing workflows and tweaking AI parameters like context windows and embeddings in real-time to achieve flawless automation.
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AI automates tactical tasks, shifting the PM's role from process management to de-risking delivery by developing deep customer insights. This allows PMs to spend more time confirming their instincts about customer needs, which engineering teams now demand.
The next frontier for AI in product is automating time-consuming but cognitively simple tasks. An AI agent can connect CRM data, customer feedback, and product specs to instantly generate a qualified list of beta testers, compressing a multi-week process into days.
Early AI adoption by PMs is often a 'single-player' activity. The next step is a 'multiplayer' experience where the entire team operates from a shared AI knowledge base, which breaks down silos by automatically signaling dependencies and overlapping work.
Enterprises struggle to get value from AI due to a lack of iterative, data-science expertise. The winning model for AI companies isn't just selling APIs, but embedding "forward deployment" teams of engineers and scientists to co-create solutions, closing the gap between prototype and production value.
Instead of holding context for multiple projects in their heads, PMs create separate, fully-loaded AI agents (in Claude or ChatGPT) for each initiative. These "brains" are fed with all relevant files and instructions, allowing the PM to instantly get up to speed and work more efficiently.
You can't delegate AI tool implementation to your sales team or a generalist RevOps person. Success requires a dedicated, technical owner in-house—a 'GTM engineer' or 'AI nerd.' This person must be capable of building complex campaigns and working closely with the vendor's team to train and deploy the agent effectively.
The most effective way to build a powerful automation prompt is to interview a human expert, document their step-by-step process and decision criteria, and translate that knowledge directly into the AI's instructions. Don't invent; document and translate.
The key technical skill for an AI PM is not deep knowledge of model architecture but a higher-level understanding of how to orchestrate AI components. Knowing what AI can do and how systems connect is more valuable than knowing the specifics of fine-tuning or RAG implementation.
To maximize AI's impact, don't just find isolated use cases for content or demand gen teams. Instead, map a core process like a campaign workflow and apply AI to augment each stage, from strategy and creation to localization and measurement. AI is workflow-native, not function-native.
As AI automates synthesis and creation, the product manager's core value shifts from managing the development process to deeply contextualizing all available information (market, customer, strategy) to define the *right* product direction.