AI Is Not a Feature. It's a New Interaction Model.
A colleague told me something a few weeks ago that stuck with me more than it probably should have.
"AI is going to bring a big change in tech in the next 3-4 months."
Not "in the next few years." Not "eventually." Next 3-4 months. I didn't fully agree with the timeline, but I couldn't stop thinking about the confidence behind it. Because he wasn't talking about a new model release or a benchmark score. He was talking about a shift in how people expect to work. And that's a very different claim.
It made me want to write down what I actually think is happening here, before I build anything else under this section.
You've seen the joke by now. Slap "+ AI" onto literally anything — a candle, a toothbrush, a fridge — and suddenly it's a product category. It's funny because it's true, and it's true because we've seen this exact pattern before.
We had physical work. Then came machines. And the fear back then was simple: if machines do the work, people go unemployed. That didn't happen. Machines didn't erase work, they erased tasks, and humans found new layers of work sitting right above the old ones. Operating the machine. Maintaining it. Designing what it should do next.
AI is the same pattern playing out one layer up. It's not erasing work, it's erasing tasks — and the joke about "+AI" selling more isn't really about AI being magic. It's the market's way of saying: we already sense the layer is moving, we just don't know exactly where the new work will land yet. So everyone's slapping AI onto everything, half as a bet, half as a hedge.
That's layer one. Here's layer two, and it's the one I actually care about as a PM.
As humans, we've always tried to eliminate redundancy. Not because we're lazy, but because attention is the scarcest thing we have. Every tool we've built, from the wheel to the spreadsheet, is really just an attempt to free up consciousness for something better than repetition.
AI is the most aggressive version of that attempt yet. It doesn't just remove physical redundancy, it starts removing cognitive redundancy — the parts of thinking that were never really thinking, just retrieval, formatting, navigating.
Which leaves an uncomfortable but clarifying question: if the tool can do retrieval, formatting, and navigation for us, what's actually left for us to do?
My answer: judgment. Framing the right problem. Deciding what's worth doing at all. That's the layer AI hasn't touched, and it's the layer that decides whether everything below it is even pointed in the right direction.
Once you accept that, you stop asking "what should I automate" and start asking a more interesting question: what is the interaction supposed to look like now that thinking is the scarce resource, not clicking?
That question is what this whole section is built on.
Everyone in product right now is asking: