What does AI mean for Product Teams?

We ran a survey to find out. Here’s what we learned.

To see what else we learned about how digital experience teams work, check out the full survey.

Everyone is buzzing about Artificial Intelligence. Will it transform industry, elevate society, and save humanity? Or will it enslave us all?

This is not AI’s first rodeo. Way back in the 1950s, AI research used symbolic logic to mimic human reasoning, but data and computing power was scarce. The 1980s got us excited about expert systems and rule-based AI. The early 2000s brought breakthroughs in machine learning and statistical AI. By the 2010s, deep learning and neural networks had emerged, and finally there were large enough datasets and powerful computers to run them on. 

So, AI may finally be here for real. And we wanted to know: In a world that has more data than we know what to do with, what does this mean for product teams?

We surveyed the entire market, including companies like yours, and found that a majority believe AI will change the way they analyze the customer journey, and nearly everyone feels that they could be making more data-informed decisions.

“What’s coming in the next year?”

It’s fair to say that teams across the board are both:

• Significantly enthused about the possibilities, and 

• Concerned about the effects of AI on their day-to-day routines. 

A clear majority believe that it’s inevitable that AI will be folded into their workflows to some degree or another. How much will that change things? On that teams are a bit more divided on how much that will change the way they do things.

Although about 12% of respondents are convinced that AI will change everything, a slightly smaller percentage thinks that this time around, AI is not going to have much of an impact. 

When it comes to analyzing the customer journey, an even greater majority (over half!) of teams believe that AI will change the way they look at their customers’ behavior. 

• On one hand, AI will certainly bring new levels of possibility for scrutinizing user behavior.

• On the other, it will likely create many more categories of metrics and pathways to manage.

So while AI will help alleviate tasks, it may also create more tasks that you’ll need help with. Similar to our first question, there’s an equivalent number of people split between thinking AI is a sure thing—or it's a bust. 

“How will AI change your analysis?”

People are generally willing to grant that AI will be good at the hunter-gatherer grunt work of analytics—harvesting, sorting, cleaning, and querying all of the data. They’re less convinced of its ability to help refine raw outputs into actionable insights. Or its ability to make challenging tasks less odious, like mining insights from information or sharing it amongst teams across the company.

Interestingly, only around two out of every five teams who responded believe that AI will have a measurable impact on revenue. 

Here are some of our thoughts:

1. Organizing the data for analysis

Most people are probably looking forward to this—having automated assistance to streamline data organization for analysis. Who wouldn’t? Automating data cleaning, integration, and categorization to start with the purest dataset will save a ton of time. 

2. Finding insights from the data

A little over half of the respondents look forward to AI’s assistance here. AI tools will be able to automate complex tasks like data pattern recognition and predictive analytics. 

3. Sharing insights across the org

Laboring to get everybody on the same page is something that all organizations suffer with, and generally the bigger companies get, the harder it becomes to achieve this. While slightly less than half of the teams think AI will help them with their sharing bottlenecks, there are many ways AI can ease the pain.

4. Using insights to steer the business

The fewest number of teams—or the greatest number of skeptics—think that AI will have a noticeable effect on their business goals. That said, if AI is working for you in all the other areas, why wouldn't you see at least some minimal positive effects? This is a question we look forward to revisiting next year.

In the final analysis, AI is expected to streamline the analysis process, empower teams to make data-driven decisions, and accelerate the discovery of meaningful insights within the data. Almost nobody that we surveyed believes that AI will have ZERO impact on data analysis. 

We ran a major survey to learn everything about how teams work, what tools they use, what metrics they rely on, and where they're still facing problems. Get your copy of Data Decoded: The Heap Digital Insights Report 2023.