3 Ways to Use AI For Product Managers (that isn’t ChatGPT)

When it comes to using AI for product management, most PMs just…aren’t that impressed.

And with good reason. While recent evidence shows that AI can boost productivity by up to 40%, popular tools like ChatGPT do very little to help with product management tasks in particular.

Luckily, there's a world of AI out there beyond just ChatGPT.

When used successfully, AI has helped product management teams at companies like Worldstrides save up to 20 hours per month, analyze 6,000+ points of customer feedback, and enable over 100 sales reps.

If you’re looking for similar results for your product management team, here are 3 advanced AI use cases for product managers that’ll help you meet deadlines, scale your abilities, and stay ahead of the competition. 

We’ll also show you our best free and paid AI product management tools you can use to start automating these tasks today. (Sign up for a free Ignition account so you can follow along.)

Here’s what we’ll be covering:

• Use Case #1: Snooping on competitors
• Use Case #2: Aggregate and analyze all of your customer data
• Use Case #3: Launch planning
• Best free AI product management tools
• Frequently asked questions about AI for Product Management 

Use Case #1: Snooping on competitors

Competitive monitoring is a pretty big deal for product managers. 

In fact, 21% percent of PMs consider competitive intel to be the primary influence on their product strategy, according to the 2024 State of Product Management Report.

But if word on the block is to be believed, manually monitoring competitors is also one of the most dreaded tasks that a PM has to perform.

The old way – Trying to keep your competitive intel from going out of date

For starters, it takes hours to snoop on all your competitors’ info. You've got to:

• Stay up to date with messaging, feature, and pricing updates 
• Keep a tab on customer reviews
• Regularly stalk social media accounts for additional insights 

And so much more.

But the worst part is that all that valuable intel you dig up often goes completely outdated within only a few months. 

So your intel becomes unusable for product planning, AND your sales reps stay unprepared for competitive deals.

The new way – Automatically monitor competitors with AI

Manually keeping up with competitor trends is inefficient and unnecessarily stressful – like using pen and paper for calculations instead of a scientific calculator. 

Instead, trade in your spreadsheets for AI-powered competitive intelligence tools like Ignition. Ignition’s sales battlecards automate the majority of your competitive research so you can focus on product strategy and discovery instead.

Ignition’s AI instantly surfaces key takeaways for each of your competitors, like revenue, talking points (strengths, weaknesses, pricing, and more), features, recent news, review scores, and SEO data. These insights can be used to inform your strategy and to instantly generate sales battlecards that sync with your CRM – making your competitive intel easily accessible to your sales team and actionable in real time.

The best part? Compared to standalone competitive intel platforms, Ignition is about 1/10th of the cost and made specifically for product managers.

A lot of Ignition users like to start out by trying the battlecard generator, but we recommend integrating your CRM. Our AI works best with your unique company and customer data! 

Sign up for a free Ignition account to start automating and managing your competitive intel.

Use Case #2: Analyze Voice of Customer data to continuously build roadmaps

Every product manager knows that valuable Voice of Customer feedback can be a gold mine for a product.

But as of 2024, 24% of product managers find collecting customer feedback to be the most difficult activity to track and measure in their role. 

The main reason for this boils down to process.

The old way – Spending hours parsing through customer data

When it comes to customer research, PMs typically have to read support tickets, watch recorded sales calls, look through testimonials, and analyze surveys – all manually. There’s a ton of info out there, but it's understandably time-intensive to aggregate and summarize it all. 

As a result, PMs often end up too busy to focus on customer research as much as they should. Which can lead to situations like this…

But the fault isn’t with PMs. It’s the lack of a scalable process for conducting customer research to continuously stay in touch with real users.

The new way - Use AI to automatically summarize your customer feedback (and create roadmaps!)

No human can parse through thousands of customer feedback points in real time. The good news? AI can.

With Ignition’s AI customer research tool, you can automatically:

• Gather all of your customer data from your CRM, support tickets, and conversational intel tools in one place.
• Summarize customer data to identify themes (and make more data-driven product decisions).
• Analyze key win-loss data when you connect your CRM, and find out why you’re winning and losing deals.

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But that’s not all. Once you’ve connected your CRM to your account, our AI analyzes your CRM data and customer conversations to automatically identify and categorize critical feature gaps currently blocking deals – and then adds them to your idea backlog.

This idea backlog can be used to create a roadmap using our free product roadmap template. 

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Roadmap items are then automatically prioritized based on revenue opportunity – helping you build what your highest-paying customers want.

(We like to call this process revenue-based roadmapping.)

Ultimately, Ignition makes your customer research truly implementable by creating one place of truth for all of your customer feedback – and then connecting your research to your building process. 

Get started with a free Ignition account today. 

Use Case #3: Launch planning

Historically, launches were the point where product managers signed off, and product marketers took over. 

But with roles and markets changing, there’s recently been an increasing emphasis on product managers playing bigger roles in GTM processes.

As with any cross-team collaboration, however, this comes with a fair share of problems…

The old way – Messy, complicated handoffs to marketing and sales 

Anyone who has ever been involved with a launch knows that they’re chaotic (read: traumatic) processes where mistakes do not come cheap. 

A launch checklist alone just doesn’t cut it, and there’s always a new crisis around the corner – making it so the launch plan needs to be updated about a million times. 

When your launch plan is a spreadsheet attached to a jumble of other documents, this process isn’t exactly easy — one change of plans can derail the entire process.

Factor in accessibility issues and data silos across teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster in the making. 

The new way – Generate launch plans instantly with AI

Why should you use generalized tools, like Notion and Airtable, for your launch plans…when AI can generate one for you instantly?

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In Ignition, you can use your roadmaps to instantly generate a customizable launch plan that’s personalized based on launch tier, budget, and GTM motion.

Each launch plan includes a detailed look at what channels should be used, what assets need to be created, and what tasks need to be done. Best practices are already built in, so the checklist that your junior employees get helps them level up and behave like those with more experience. 

Here’s a quick video to show you how it works:

Ignition has helped companies like MRI Software make launches 50% more efficient by scaling their product marketing abilities and has helped Kajabi completely standardize their launch process. 

So if you’re looking for similar results for your own launch, get started today by signing up for a free Ignition account.

Best free AI product management tools

• Free AI Product Requirements Document Generator - Generate a product requirement doc in seconds using only a few essential details.

• Free AI Jira issue writer - Instantly get an Issue title, user story, and acceptance criteria.

• Free AI Release Notes Generator - Give it a tiny bit of context about the latest features you shipped – and let AI automatically write the release notes for you.

• Free AI Persona Generator - Create detailed user personas in seconds, customized with demographic data, goals, pain points, and buying processes — and even use custom illustrations and images.

Frequently asked questions about AI for Product Management 

How is AI used in product management?

While AI can be used in multiple different ways in product management, in our opinion, the use cases of AI should focus on routine execution work instead of strategy and vision-related work. 

This can range from updating competitive research, to analyzing customer data, creating roadmaps, enabling sales and engineering teams, generating launch plans, and more. 

Ultimately, strategic work is what human product managers do much better at, while routine admin tasks can be done much more efficiently by AI. Using AI in this way can help product management teams concentrate on what they’re most qualified for, while saving time and reducing stress. 

Will product managers be replaced by AI?

In short – no, at least not on a wide scale. It’s more likely that product managers who are better at working with AI will be given more preference over those who don’t by companies. 

Strategic product management work still definitely needs human intelligence to power it. With the widespread usage of AI, product managers' roles on a day-to-basis will probably focus more on strategy than administrative or executive tasks.

34% of product managers believe product strategy, roadmapping, and launch planning should be done with the same tool. 

With Ignition – that tool can be yours.

It’s time to research, build, and launch with confidence. Join hundreds of teams who use Ignition as a unified source of truth to automate processes, gain critical real-time insights, and enable cross-team collaboration – all with the help of AI.

Get started today by signing up for a free Ignition account.