What's really happening with AI right now?͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | |
| | FRESH INSIGHT BRIAN BALFOUR
The AI reality check every product leader needs right now
At the recent Reforge AI Summit, I opened the day by taking a macro look at how AI is actually affecting the market right now. Can you really just focus on growth and wait for the unit economics to fix themselves? Are teams actually smaller? How much AI tinkering actually ships? Here's what the data and our experience show across strategy, tools, teams, and process.
- AI capabilities double every 7 months. How do we build differentiated products when the technology shifts this fast?
- ChatGPT is winning the distribution shift. It's on track to hit one billion monthly active users this year and retention is high.
- Cost to serve isn't decreasing. Older models get cheaper, but users don't want them. As models get more capable, users consume more tokens.
- Only 5% of AI deployments make it to production. The failure isn't cost or ROI. It's human adoption, procurement and company culture.
- Companies aren't getting smaller. Only 5% of companies are reducing headcount. The ones deploying AI most aggressively are actually hiring more.
- Engineering efficiency doesn't equal product velocity. Product development is only as fast as its slowest bottleneck, which has shifted from engineering to product management.
Watch the full presentation to ground yourself in what's actually happening with AI. No hype, just a reality check.
Watch: AI Reality Check
| | FRESH INSIGHT BRIAN BALFOUR
The AI reality check every product leader needs right now
At the recent Reforge AI Summit, I opened the day by taking a macro look at how AI is actually affecting the market right now. Can you really just focus on growth and wait for the unit economics to fix themselves? Are teams actually smaller? How much AI tinkering actually ships? Here's what the data and our experience show across strategy, tools, teams, and process.
- AI capabilities double every 7 months. How do we build differentiated products when the technology shifts this fast?
- ChatGPT is winning the distribution shift. It's on track to hit one billion monthly active users this year and retention is high.
- Cost to serve isn't decreasing. Older models get cheaper, but users don't want them. As models get more capable, users consume more tokens.
- Only 5% of AI deployments make it to production. The failure isn't cost or ROI. It's human adoption, procurement and company culture.
- Companies aren't getting smaller. Only 5% of companies are reducing headcount. The ones deploying AI most aggressively are actually hiring more.
- Engineering efficiency doesn't equal product velocity. Product development is only as fast as its slowest bottleneck, which has shifted from engineering to product management.
Watch the full presentation to ground yourself in our current AI reality. No hype, just a reality check.
Read more
| | We've been tracking AI adoption data across strategy, tools, teams, and process, and what's actually happening doesn't match the common narratives about cost decreases, team reductions or productivity gains.
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These insights come from data and our own experience building and launching four AI SaaS products this year. You can learn more here:
- Reforge Build is an AI prototyping tool to help you validate features faster without starting from scratch.
- Reforge Launch enables builders to go from insight to launch with AI-native feature flags and configuration.
- Reforge Insights provides your entire product team (PM, Eng and Design) with actionable insights right in their existing tools.
- Reforge Research helps you uncover new opportunities to drive higher conversion, retention and product satisfaction.
| | In this presentation, I walk through the six major gaps between what leaders expect from AI and what's actually happening on the ground.
Watch: AI Reality Check
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