Quick note: I’m writing about productivity here, in end-user scenarios. What we’re seeing in business apps and services is way beyond the scope here!
AI. You might have heard of it. Little buzz thing going on just now, apparently it might change the world.
I think it already has, and will continue to change things in both positively impactful and potentially negative ways. It depends on context and perspective. Will it take all our jobs away and make humans irrelevant? I don’t think so. Will it take some jobs away and require retraining and shiftings of ways we get things done? I believe yes. Will it create NET NEW jobs? Also yes.
I also believe that what we are seeing is an adjustment of the 80/20 rule. But it’s not just that AI will take over the 80, it most certainly is, has and will. But I think it’s a bit more of a behavioral shift than that. Think about the calculator … did we stop doing math just because we had a pocket machine in our hands? No, we just moved beyond that aspect and spent more time on higher order things that require human context and reasoning. This is what I think is happening in real time right now. We’re figuring out what AI is good at (and that is a lot of things, but not everything) and how we can use this tool to do new things, different things, better things … faster.
And speaking of “faster”, this space is the fastest of the fast. In 2025, we focused a lot on “how to talk to the AI” i.e. learning how to use prompts. In 2026, we have already moved beyond that to focus on the context we give it. These tools are only as good as the information and context you give them. (But be careful, see the note below in the Guardrails and Cautions section!).
Humans + AI
In the world of product marketing I have found myself cautious. I am very much against auto generated content being spewed out without review. The AI tooling we have today is far too nascent to warrant full and complete trust. We can proveably see it make things up :)
I’ve seen a bunch of generated content that to the uninitiated looks awesome, but when viewed by knowledgeable and practitioner level audiences is quite literally incoherent garbage. Context matters. Perspective matters. Intuition matters.
Before we get all excited and jump in, if you’re using these tools in a professional PMM capacity, I suggest three non-negotiable rules:
- Zero-Trust Fact Checking: AI is a “vibe engine,” not a database. Never publish a technical claim or a stat without manual verification.
- Context over Keywords: AI can write a resume, but it doesn’t know your specific PMM philosophy. Inject your own unique perspective and “opinionated” views.
- Data Sovereignty: Assume anything you type in could eventually be used to train future models unless you’re on an Enterprise instance.
OK, onto those use cases!
Practical Use Cases for PMMs
Here’s a few use cases I’ve personally found intriguing and helpful in Getting Stuff Done. There’s nothing stunningly crazy here, but a lot of the real value is in productivity gains and speeding up execution.
- Idea Generation: Creating a list of interesting things and running up first drafts are obvious kickstarters.
- Idea Iteration: Generate 10 different versions, quickly testing words and meanings.
- Test tone, change perspective: Asking tools to shift voices or role perspectives.
- Notebooks As Briefs: Aggregating assets to generate summaries, FAQ’s and mind maps.
- Aggregating Content: Creating compilations to gain multiple uses of the same content.
- Summarizing Long Form Content: Capturing both common and contrasting viewpoints from long reports.
- Transforming Content: Moving from slides to docs, or transcripts to slides, quickly and efficiently.
- Web Research: Reasoning over links to summarize and compare insights.
- Image Generation: Visualizing diagrams and frameworks ahead of design activities.
Some more advanced items are rapidly evolving and should be top of mind for teams actively pursuing AI use in product marketing:
- Persona Stress-Testing: Interview your ICP/persona docs as a skeptical customer to find messaging gaps.
- Simulating the Buyer: Act as a “Critical Buyer” to poke holes in a new messaging framework.
- Competitive Battlecard Drafting: Comparing two sets of information and highlighting differences in depth.
- AI+SEO Metadata Optimization: Ensuring content is technically structured for search intent.
- Human Perspective: Doubling down on customer stories and “opinionated” branding that an LLM can’t replicate.
Guardrails and Cautions
There are a couple of areas where PMM’s in particular should be cautious and careful:
- Data Leakage: Inadvertent sharing of unreleased product features or roadmap details is a hazard.
- The Source of Truth problem: AI is a great summarizer but a terrible fact-checker. We are the ones accountable for verifying claims!
I’m excited by what these tools can do, and if we adopt carefully, safely, and with an appropriate set of checks and balances as they evolve, we’re heading into an exciting world.
I’m currently building out a set of AI in PMM Quickstarts to help teams move faster without losing their soul. Keep an eye on the blog for the launch.
Adam