The executive pressure is on: every PM is being asked, ‘What’s our AI strategy?’ Too often, this translates into a frantic race to bolt on AI-powered features—a summary generator here, a chatbot there. This is the ‘AI-featured’ approach. It’s a tempting, tangible way to show progress, but it often mistakes activity for impact.
The real strategic challenge is building ‘AI-native’ products. This isn’t about adding AI to an existing workflow; it’s about reimagining the entire user journey and value proposition from the ground up, with AI as the core enabling technology. An AI-featured product makes an old process slightly more efficient. An AI-native product creates a new, fundamentally better way of solving the user’s core problem, creating a defensible moat in the process.
As product leaders, we need to push the conversation beyond feature-sprinkling. It requires deeper user research to find the problems that only AI can solve and a willingness to place bigger, more foundational bets. It’s the difference between a faster horse and a car.
How are you navigating this on your teams? Are you focused on shipping AI features, or are you carving out the strategic space to build something truly AI-native?