Product Discovery in the Age of AI How Product Owners Can Think, Experiment, and Build Faster in an AI-Enabled world. Chapter One – Making Sense of AI in Product Discovery
AI seems to be everywhere. You can’t open a LinkedIn feed or view an X post without noticing someone sharing the next big shift in AI. Whether it’s how to correctly prompt to get the best out of Claude or OpenAI’s latest model, or pushing the latest approach to build AI agents that will make you six-figure sums. I call this the euphoria phase. It is the phase where FOMO is high, and the pace of change is so fast that we find it difficult to keep up. That is the challenge with the euphoria phase. Things move so quickly that you either hyper focus or you’re feeling left behind. It reminds me of the dot-com era. The internet was proposed by Bill Gates as “an unavoidable part of life”7, yet no one was completely sure how it would change the world. We all had opinions for sure, but no one was ever completely confident. You either get behind the camp that disbelieves and gives itself a reason not to engage, or you experiment. Remember the famous Bill Gates Letterman interview 8 when Bill Gates explained the internet to a sceptical audience?7 The clip is a reminder of how transformative technologies often seem unclear or exaggerated before their value becomes obvious. If you were not in the sceptical camp, your interest aligned with the group that believed a Cambrian shift had already arrived, a shift that meant we need to experiment and learn through it to understand use cases and possibilities. That requires patience. That requires belief.
