💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat - the future of AI in Products with Rich Mironov
💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat 27 with Rich Mironov on the future of AI in Products
Product Circle Chat is runs every second week as a Zoom call that anyone can join to talk all things product, product management and problem solving. Creating value for customers and the business.
“Building the wrong things faster is not a path to success” - Rich Mironov
This Product Circle Chat was run 15 August 2024 at 10am (Sydney Australia time).
👩 Humans hallucinate. 🤖Systems don't.
💡 "Hallucination is something that humans do by misperceiving the world in a certain way based on their optics.
I'm out in the 🏜 desert, and I see the reflection of the light against the sand, and I perceive there is an oasis or or water 🌊 there, right?
💻 Machines don't care.💔
👩 Humans hallucinate. 🤖Systems don't.
They simply give us wrong answers.
There's no intent here. There's just pushing the bits.
So I worry when people start to attribute knowledge instead of processing."
We talked
✨ about the need for Quality Assurance and Checking for correctness over plausability on the output
✨ the rise in QA for correctness costs that can't be outsourced
✨ our personalising or humanising of AI and the problem with assigning intent
✨ the reality of output only being as good as the input, training material and prompts
and more
Product Circle Chat 27 - Topic
Topic: AI PRODUCT Strategy is not the same as an AI TOOLS Strategy
More and more product folks have been hypnotized by new AI tools… rushing to add AI to their products without a clear idea of how this will help their users. Focused more on what we could do with cool tech, rather than starting from customer problems and the best ways to address those problems.
We’ll unpack some of the pressure to implement AI, different phases of exploration, and some product risks we should think about… before committing to AI in our products.
Product Circle Chat 27 - Video
Product Circle Chat 27 - Speaker
Product Circle Chat was run 15 August 2024 at 10am (Sydney Australia time) with Rich Mironov.
Rich Mironov is a 40-year veteran of Silicon Valley product management, including six startups and 200+ consulting clients. He coaches product leaders, helps design product organizations, and has parachuted into software companies 15 times as interim VP Products/CPO.
He been blogging about software product management since 2002, launched the first Product Camp, and wrote “The Art of Product Management” (which one lucky attendee at 💡Product Circle⭕ Chat WON! ).
You can find more of Rich’s wisdom at mironov.com.
Rich’s Slides
Chat Summary
AI is currently highly hyped, appearing in almost every business and tech magazine. However, most discussions focus on how AI works rather than what it should be used for. The critical product question is whether AI is applied to solve the right problems and add real customer value.
Rich differentiated between an AI product strategy (creating value with AI) and an AI tool strategy (simply using AI tools). Many companies add AI without purpose, mainly to appease investors, which Rich referred to as “AI washing.”
Product managers need to critically assess whether adding AI will actually benefit customers and the business. The right application of AI involves evaluating if it solves a valuable problem, is strategic, and delivers real user benefits.
AI systems can deliver plausible but incorrect answers, and often these mistakes go unnoticed. Companies must prioritize building trust and ensuring data accuracy. Misuse of AI in areas like building codes or medical diagnostics can have severe consequences.
Implementing AI can be costly—it requires ongoing human quality assurance (QA) and monitoring, as AI systems degrade over time due to changes in data and context.
AI can speed up decision-making but may also perpetuate biases, as seen in mortgage applications and facial recognition systems. AI should be cautiously integrated into systems where accuracy is critical, such as in medical diagnoses.
Much like websites or mobile apps, AI will eventually become table stakes. In the future, differentiating based on AI alone won’t be enough, and product managers will need to focus on delivering real value.
Product Circle Chat - Q&A
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