Does AI make Product Management obsolete?

I'm hearing different flavors of this question: “With AI doing more of the thinking, do we even need product managers anymore?”

It’s the wrong conclusion — drawn from the right observation.

Yes, AI is accelerating delivery.

Yes, it’s lowering the cost of experimentation.

Yes, it’s helping teams generate code, requirements, tests, and even UX.

But none of that answers the most important questions:

-What problem should we solve?

-For which customers?

-At what cost?

-And why now vs. everything else we could build?

If anything, AI raises the bar for product leadership.

When building becomes cheaper and faster, decisions matter even more.

You can now ship the wrong thing at record speed and ignore the warning signs along the way.

Strong product teams are becoming force multipliers:

-Using AI to explore more options and rapid prototyping

-Validate assumptions faster

-Simulate tradeoffs

Focus human effort on judgment, sequencing, and value and use AI to improve outcomes.

AI doesn’t replace product management. It removes the friction that kept product teams stuck in documentation and coordination.

What’s left is the hard part: strategy, prioritization, and judgment.

And those don’t get automated.