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AI Is Everywhere, But What Business Impact Is It Making?
- Jul 28
- 21 min read
Episode 104
AI is everywhere—but what business impact is it actually making? In this episode, JJ Rorie sits down with Faisal Masud, President of HP’s Digital Services and Workforce Experience, to dig into where AI is already creating real value and where the economics are still uncertain. They unpack the hype versus reality of AI adoption, from customer service automation and robotics to the emerging agentic tooling ecosystem—and what all of this means for product leaders under pressure to show ROI, not just experimentation.
Faisal shares his perspective on how AI is reshaping the classic product “trifecta” of PM, design, and engineering, enabling smaller, leaner teams to ship faster while raising the bar on individual impact. He explains why “less is more” when it comes to headcount, how dashboards are becoming obsolete in a world of intelligent prompts and nudges, and why product leaders can no longer rely on being air-traffic controllers sitting above the work.
The conversation also explores how AI is transforming careers and organizations. JJ and Faisal talk about what new grads and early-career product folks should focus on, why managers need to retool as hands-on contributors, and how some companies are carving out “labs” or Horizon 3 teams to explore breakthrough ideas two-plus years out. Along the way, they discuss the shift from seat-based SaaS pricing to outcome-based models and why product managers must increasingly think and act like general managers, deeply accountable for the economic value their products deliver.
This episode is a must-listen for product managers, leaders, and teams who want to move beyond AI FOMO and build products—and careers—grounded in real, measurable business impact.
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SUMMARY
Topics Covered:
Where AI is already delivering clear ROI (customer service, robotics, fulfillment) and where the economics are still murky.
How AI is reshaping the product “trifecta” (PM, design, engineering) and compressing the lifecycle from concept to first version.
Why “less is more” in team size, and how AI changes expectations for velocity, contribution, and career paths.
Mindsets and skills for new grads and tenured professionals to stay relevant in an AI-first product world.
Rethinking dashboards, workflows, and organizational structures (e.g., labs / Horizon 3) to match a prompt-driven, AI-augmented future.
The shift from seat-based SaaS pricing to outcome-based models, and why PMs must think and act like GMs focusing on economic value and ROI.
Key Quotes:
“We’ve reached the chapter where the ROI discussion is becoming more important… boards were just in massive FOMO mode, not in AI, then you’re failing.”
“Less is more. You don’t need gigantic teams anymore… the more people that are involved, it’s an anchor on the business.”
“The product leader is no longer just doing this air traffic control. That air traffic control job is dead… nobody needs managers.”
“PMs need to be GMs… my role as a PM is not just to paint the pixels in front of my customer, it’s actually to give them economic value for my product.”
Takeaways:
Focus AI where ROI is clear.
AI’s most tangible value today shows up in areas like customer service and physical automation, where efficiency gains and cost savings are measurable and repeatable.
Redefine the product trifecta.
AI is blurring the traditional lines between PM, design, and engineering, enabling individuals to take ideas from concept to first version faster and with fewer handoffs.
Smaller teams, higher leverage.
Instead of adding headcount, leaders should build lean teams that use AI as “intelligence as a service,” raising the expected output of each person rather than increasing layers and voices.
Treat AI fluency as table stakes.
New grads and experienced professionals alike must become hands-on with AI and frontier models, viewing them as core skills, not optional enhancements to their resumes.
Replace dashboards with intelligent nudges.
Rather than staring at static metrics, teams should rely on AI-driven prompts and alerts, supported by dedicated “labs” or Horizon 3 efforts that explore breakthrough experiences.
Shift from seats to outcomes.
With seat-based pricing under pressure, customers care less about user counts and more about hard results, like reduced ticket volume, lower support costs, or faster resolution times.
Evolve from PM to GM.
Product managers need to own the full economic story—features, business model, and ROI—acting like general managers who can clearly explain and deliver the financial value of their products.
TRANSCRIPT
JJ: Hello, and welcome to Product Voices. Today's conversation is actually something I've been looking forward to for quite a while, because we've all been spending our time immersed in AI, and w- that means something different to each of us. But one of the things that I've been interested in learning more about is how we as product teams, how we as businesses will really ensure that all of the work that we put into and the changes that we make around AI actually are going to have an impact to our business and to our users and to our products.
And I think it's easy to jump in and make some of these changes, and I think we should explore and do some things differently with the new tools that we have at our disposal today.
But at the end of the day, we're still business people, we're still people who are trying to solve problems for users, and are we actually doing that?
And how well are we doing that, and how do we continue to focus on that? So that's our conversation today. I have a very exciting guest with me. Faisal Masud is president of HP's Digital Services and Workforce Experience, and he is an expert at this. And so I am very much looking forward to his insights and to learning from him.
Faisal, nice to meet you. Thank you for joining me.
Faisal: Thank you. Thanks for having me, JJ.
JJ: Again, I'm looking forward to this conversation. Let me just start with, of course, everyone's adopting AI. That means a little bit different things to each person and each product team and each business. But I don't know of many folks in many teams that aren't somewhere in that cycle of adoption.
And as we see this continue to explode and everything changes almost on a daily basis, it seems, I personally am very interested, as I said, like, what's the actual business impact that we're seeing, and are we seeing that yet? And do we know what to look for yet? At best, it might seem like incremental impact is happening.
What do you think? What are you seeing when it comes to the impact of the AI adoption, the AI changes that businesses are ma- making?
Faisal: It's a question that gets asked a lot internally and also obviously externally when we're talking to SaaS product vendors too that are AI powered. But I think we've reached the chapter where the ROI discussion is becoming more important.
Until this point, the boards were just in massive FOMO mode, not in AI, then you're failing. And that's where typically the challenges occur, is when you're just running in a direction without really knowing where you're running to. I think there's some very specific concrete places where the impact of AI is fairly straightforward and the ROI is pretty clear.
I would say when it comes to customer service- Mm ... it's, there's no argument here that natural language and voice and AI play a pretty critical role, especially for the L1, L2, a lower level ticketing for customer service. We all face this when we're either on a chat, email, voice, what have you, text. You can pretty much resolve a ton of these problems through AI, whether it's your car ride that went wrong and you're trying to get that resolved, or it's your transaction with Amazon or with HP.
The other clear one in the physical AI is obviously robotics and fulfillment and all of that. And I come from s- some of that background with drone delivery, and I can tell you that- While the economics might not all be there for in the air autonomy, it's definitely there for the robots- on the ground.
So those economics make sense because humans don't scale, right? Humans get sick. Humans have other priorities. They have other things to do, and sometimes they don't show up because they've got other things on their mind. And so that's where AI plays a great role. To conclude, though, on this particular point, I think it's not a one size fits all.
And this notion of agent to agent, and we're gonna go agentic, and everything is agentic, there's so much hype here that ... And don't forget, JJ, that a ton of these products that are being sold to enterprises by these AI wrappers and everybody else, who will be a whole other chapter. But the economics for them are not that good.
Yeah. While the enterprise might be benefiting for that short-term gain of getting some workflow capability enabled at a low price, that price might not hold for that long. So I think there's more to be done, but I think in the next 12 to 18 months are gonna be greater innovation than the last many years.
JJ: Yeah. All of what you said, of course, but that last point is very intriguing, the business models around all of this. It's, how is it going to, to pan out? And I, it's yet to be seen. And I think that some of the businesses who are making some of the changes, even maybe some of the low-hanging fruit or the things that you've discussed that are fairly straightforward ROI, those business models for some of the vendors may change, and the ecosystem or the work stream flows that we're putting in place, even on those use cases that seem to make a lot of sense, may have some nuance in the short term and certainly the long term.
So it's just a very fascinating time, and I know there's a lot of good and bad kind of media and chatter around it, but it is a fas- fascinating time to be in our seats. So let me ask you this. May- maybe a bit of a segue off of that. There's, there's some of the use cases that you m
entioned, there's embedding AI into our product or our service layers.
That's something that I think most companies will do if they're not already doing. What about completely re- redesigning enterprise or, or user journeys, or really, like, embedding AI in a higher level, in a system level? What are you seeing there? Are only the cream of the crop ready to do that? What's the difference in that?
What are you seeing in that arena?
Faisal: Yeah, I think it kind of reminds me of early days where We used to say there's an app for that, and then we said there's SaaS for that. There's always a service for that. And now it's like there's AI for that. Mm-hmm. So in some cases, I would say there is. If you look at product management as a function, there's a dramatic change that has happened.
The trifecta of the product manager, the designer, and the engineering grouping is changing because if you're an engineer, do you need all that help from product and design? And if you're in a product manager, do you need all that help from engineering or design? Or if you're a designer.
JJ: Yep.
Faisal: It could go either way. So I think you're providing this incredible power now to all these specific domain experts that if they want to leapfrog their capabilities from what they used to do in this very specific domain-oriented work, now it can be way more than that. You can go from creating your early artifacts of your product design and publish, and go straight to your first version or so. And I said... So I think that's breaking. Our teams use ChatPRD and all those tools that are available. Mm-hmm. Figma is complete- Figma's completely transformed. Like that's- Yeah ... a whole different ballgame, right? So I would say when it comes to workflows in the specific domain of, I would say, product, there's a significant change, and I think it's gonna keep happening.
And I don't think it's change that's actually negative. But back to the earlier point about is this economically viable for those who are providing these services? Figma, if you look at their growth, yeah, perhaps so far so good. But longer term, where does this net out with Claude and everybody else coming in- and Codex and, on all that. So I would say there's more change coming, but so far it's been pretty positive in, in, in the sort of product arena.
JJ: Yeah. I love that. And I feel very lucky to be the age that I am and have had the career arc that I am because I b- essentially started my career at, in the dot com area, e- er- era, right, right around the 2000 timeframe. So I've seen this, these, like, transformations of the business world and of product, and this is yet another one, maybe a little bit different and certainly maybe more impactful over the long run of its course. But it is very interesting to see 'cause we're still in the early days, and AI has been around for many decades, of course.
But what we're seeing, and certainly the p- the pace of change is still new. And so we don't know yet what's going to happen. But I think taking some lessons from the past and being open to a completely new future is what I'm seeing the best businesses do, with also kno- knowing that they don't know yet.
We- nobody knows yet what it, how it's all going to pan out. So when you think about your product team, your clients' product teams, and that ecosystem, right? To your point, I love your point about those, the trio or the group or the main core product team. Those roles are changing, and what are we gonna do about it?
Like what opportunities and constraints do you see right now? Let's start with opportunities. What opportunities do you see for a product team? Lots of product leaders listening now, and product managers, et cetera. What should they be thinking about in terms of trying to leverage some of the opportunities that may be in front of them right now
Faisal: it's a really good question because I built my own startup, you might know, at Fabric, and we went from a very small team to almost 350, 400 people. And as I look back at your question and I think about what would I think about what I did there versus what's happening today, I would say the learnings are just accelerated. I'd say the biggest learning for me is less is more.
JJ: Yeah.
Faisal: You don't need gigantic teams anymore.
JJ: Yeah.
Faisal: You just don't. In fact, it's an anchor on the business. The more people that are involved, there's just two's company, three's a crowd, it's just- Mm ... it, you want fewer voices and fewer opinions because you've got intelligence as a service right around the corner over here, right? Intelligence is a complete commodity at this point.
And so do you need all these additional voices, especially with Fable and everything else? Oh my God, it's wild the level of sophistication we're reaching at this point. So I'd say number one, the hard truth that I learned at Fabric for me was hire slow, as slow as possible, and make sure the teams are running in a very lean fashion versus just having more people is the answer.
I think that AI has just accelerated to a whole different stratosphere. So like the solopreneur startups are, you probably saw the graphs- Mm-hmm ... they're just kinda going like this. Yeah. It was total verticals, right? Where I think that the product teams need to be extremely conscientious of the fact that velocity i- everybody's looking at velocity.
They wanna know how fast you're going. Whatever you did yesterday doesn't matter. What are you doing today? And secondly, the fact that there's so much AI available now on the sorta QA side and the prototyping- Mm-hmm ... and doc rooting, that those cycles have just become faster.
And the deployments have become faster, and the management and monitoring and feedback loops have become faster.
So your team, that may have been some players on the team that are a 2X or a 3X, if they're not 10X-ing, you've got a problem.
And the last thing I'll say is the product leader is no longer just doing this air traffic control. That air traffic control job is dead. You have to be in the strategy with the customer, understanding the problems, but within the same paragraph, come down all the way to the details of the pixels that you're representing in front of the customer to make sure that they are manifested in a way that makes sense for the business.
And if you can't do that sort of elevation and latitude sort of altitude plane, you're not the right leader, because nobody needs managers.
And you'll see with this AI age that the managerial layers are at massive risk. Mm. If you're not contributing, you're not useful.
JJ: Yeah. It's, this is one of the pieces that any revolution, and again, you can look back in history and see this, that humans have to adapt to the new environment.
So I'm gonna get into some more details about what a mindset of a product team wants to hit. But before I jump there, I would love for you to share some advice for new grads, for people in the first 10 years of their careers. Y- anyone, actually, but especially those folks who are really fearful, right?
Because we're talking less people, we're talking about different ways of working, we're talking about entire layers of businesses and enterprises no longer being needed. What are the skills, what are the mindsets, what are the things that each of us needs to be thinking about if we wanna work in product and innovation in the future?
Faisal: Yeah. It's a different type of conversation for each group, right? For the fresh grad, I think it's a really important question. Everybody's situation's different.
If this is-- there could be no better time to launch your own startup. There just can't. This is gonna create a lot of entrepreneurs because you don't need...
Back when I was growing up in this world, you didn't have even cloud to give you the scale that you needed. You had to go build out all of your own infrastructure. So with cloud came all that access to SaaS and everything else. I think in today's time, do you really wanna be and working for someone or do you want to build your own product?
That's one for a product person. Do you have passion behind something that you truly believe in? And just because all of your friends are going to a particular enterprise or types of roles, that doesn't mean that's for you. So really evaluating what is your identity and what are you good at? Because where the confusion occurs is typically what their passion is versus what they're good at.
And I always caution people on this because just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean you're good at it. And at some point you might be very good at it, but as an early grad, that might be important to identify, have the self-awareness to know what you're good at. I think the second point for fresh grads would be being extremely savvy with AI and frontier models and being able to build and break all day long is gonna be unbelievably important.
Mm-hmm. That is a skill that every corporation, any startup, anybody's looking for somebody who can do that. On the more tenured folks, I would say embracing this change versus fearing this change is important. To my earlier point, just because you've been a manager and for five, six years doesn't mean you're going to be a manager for the next five, six years What was it?
I saw some article that some CTO of a public company left and joined Anthropic for, as a staff engineer.
Or something like that. I don't know who it was, but I don't remember the company or anything, but I... And I wasn't shocked completely because the rules have changed.
The playbook has changed.
Where you could at one point just tell people what to do and just sit on that strategy horse and do the strategy, those days are over. And, and so it's really important to really fine-tune the tactical skill sets and the toolkit alongside with the strategy. But here's the thing: it's not that hard.
You've got literally every piece of intelligence literally available to you at a moment's notice. Mm-hmm. So what's so difficult? I would say embracing that would be really big- Yeah ... at this point.
JJ: I tell my students at Hopkins and the other folks that I'm connected with, that they're in a precarious situation, but they're also in a, in a s- a place of strength in many ways, right?
A- again, just kinda going back to me and starting my career at the dot com era, the 30 and 40 and 50-year-olds that I started working with were, you know, they had to retrofit. They had to get their mindset first. I kinda came in as a native-ish, right? And that was a place of strength, a kind of beginner's mind, but also a s- a place of strength.
And these new grads that are coming in with this huge amount of AI knowledge already is going to be very beneficial and highly sought after. And then- Totally ... you know, that change management of getting your mindset, because we've been ingrained that you keep moving up this career ladder that was somebody made up at some point.
That career ladder is different, right? And to your point, I see a lot of really talented former managers going to IC work and being happy with it, and knowing that's gonna be their future and-
Faisal: I also, I, to that point, I also, when I was in my career, and I've been working a very long time, I was always told moving around is not a good thing.
I never really cared. I just didn't. When I got bored, I left. And when the opportunities were not there, I voted with my feet. I just moved on to the next thing. And I think it's a demand and supply situation for everybody in everything. And if the demand is high for you somewhere else, then as an, you should consider that, unless the demand is higher within where you work.
This notion of I am going to do this forever and climb that ladder, as you said, like I, I just think those rules evaporated probably- 20, 30 years ago. And they're not relevant, especially now.
JJ: Yeah. It's almost the reverse now. The longer you stay, there's almost this negative connotation to that. I, I don't know if that's fair either, but it is there.
Faisal: Sometimes it's not fair, honestly, because some of these people are excellent at what they do. . But everything else, everything is not made equal.
JJ: Yes.
Faisal: And so yeah, y- you have to go where the opportunity is and where your skill set is most needed.
Versus the comfort of having what you have. I think that, that comfort is probably the single biggest problem- that, that can impact a career.
JJ: Yeah. I agree with that, and I think especially with this kind of change, and to, to your point earlier, it's not that difficult to learn. It's the getting your mindset there in the first place and then embracing it.
I would love to dig in just a little bit more on the specifics of product teams' mindsets. Back to the fact that velocity is more important than ever, shipping features but still doing the due diligence of should we ship this fe- feature, getting those feedback loops as fast but as positive and beneficial as possible.
How do you get that, that m- the, the actual product team doing the work, including the leaders, how do you change their mindset? How do you help change your mindset to n- to know that your world is different than it was three months ago, six months ago, a year ago? This is the new reality, and this is how we have to do it.
How do you focus on helping them change their mindset because of this pace of change in this new environment?
Faisal: Yeah. It's not-- I wouldn't say it's hard, but I wouldn't also say it's easy because if you've been a PM a long period of time and you have perfected the skill of building product, you rely on yourself on those skills to continue doing that.
The problem is some of those skills are getting slightly primitive. And I'll give you just an example of my own team where dashboards are dead. There's no-- Dashboards are probably the most irrelevant thing at this point that you can deal with. Nobody wants to put their eyes on glass and just keep looking at a bunch of metrics.
You've got AI. AI can do that for you. Why are you doing this? Why do you need this? Now, however, there are customers, and our economic buyer for our platform is a CIO or a head of IT, and there are customers who want to drill in and dive in and go into the data. And yeah, you should have that. But I think the breaking the historical premise of everything must be represented in a certain way, no, because that's not the way that you are going to be functioning in a business going forward.
You're going to be functioning off of a single simple prompt or the notion of a zero prompt. You'll be actually nudged on the prompt on what to ask if it's really good. So what I'll say is our teams, where I see the opportunity and the struggle and the upside is that the teams that are building the product and just improving the product every single day are there to do that.
However, what I've found is we have a separate team in our organization, we call it Labs, that only looks at the moonshot ideas. And coming from a moonshot, I can tell you they're not quite that moonshot, but they're moonshot-ish, that they are, what does the world look like two years from now for this customer?
And sometimes it's important to separate those two groups, frankly, because it's the typical, I don't know if you've read Zone To Win, the Horizon One, Horizon Two, Horizon Three. If you're too close, if you're too ingrained in Horizon One and Two, you're never gonna think about three, and the investment's never gonna come.
So I've seen one playbook that's worked for us well so far is Workforce Experience Labs that we have internally, a small, very lean team that only thinks about the breakthrough ideas of how things should work going forward. So we collect telemetry from devices. Now we're using actually the NPU on the device to do all the heavy lifting for all of our anomaly detection. Now, in the past, that was all through the cloud, and it's not cheap, as you can imagine. So those are things that on a day-to-day basis, a PM who's building the product is not going to be spending their time on. Like, how am I going to reduce the cost of the compute on this particular feature?
No. That's, you're probably not gonna see that. You will see that for somebody who is tasked with making the product exceptional in all ways possible, specifically around making it zero-based cost possible. So being a hardware company and being a software company now, those are things that we think about, but I think that concept of just having labs and Horizon Three thinking inside the team is helpful.
JJ: Yeah, I love that advice. It's especially now, just as we've talked about, just the, nobody really knows what the future holds in a bigger way than what we usually live in, uh, in terms of predicting the future. But to have those really good minds focused on the pro- is the problem we're solving still the right one?
Are we solving it the right way? And all of those nuts and bolts, to your point about the cloud versus hardware, et cetera. So I, I love that advice. And I think that leads me to my final question for you, which is what are you seeing that are maybe some common obstacles or common mistakes that are being made right now?
And the flip side of that, what advice would you give to the listeners right now? What mistakes to watch out for, and what advice to really make this the most impactful work that they can do?
Faisal: Yeah. I mentioned some of it earlier. Less is more is generally my advice because you've got so many tools at your fingertips now.
But what got you here isn't gonna get you there. It's just not. So being completely up to date on which models are coming out, what's changing in product in general, how are SaaS companies responding to AI native companies in their space? Think about that for your product. We are AI first, but at the same time, we're still a SaaS product.
So I'll give you an example that's really relevant. Seat-based pricing is under massive threat, right? Because nobody cares about seats anymore, 'cause you can have millions of seats with these agents, right? What they care about is outcomes. What's the outcome? And this is why consulting and everything else is a massive threat because no longer can you just prepare a bunch of decks and think that's gonna be the-- gonna save you.
And I think product managers need to think very heavily about PMs need to be GMs.
The days of just being a PM are coming to an end, and they have to think about, "I'm a PM, but at the end of the day, my role as a PM is not just to paint the pixels in front of my customer. It's actually to give them economic value for my product."
And that economic value cannot be coming from somebody else. It's gotta come from the PM. So back to the trifecta or the trio breaking up, it's like the PM is the GM, so you gotta think about, "Okay, what's the ultimate ROI I'm delivering to the CIO, and would I buy that if I was the CIO?" Because a- and the last point on this is that we got so SaaSified over the past 15 years.
It was just SaaS to death, right? Everything as a service, right? And you're running thousands of applications. When I was at Staples, like we had 1,200 applications running in our enterprise. It's just like, why? Why must you do that? So now it's all about, okay, forget the seats. What are you gonna deliver? So one example I'll give you to you is that we're exploring ideas such as, all right, we'll reduce your ticket count by 30%. Each ticket costs six to $10.
Okay? That's dollars, right? Someone has to serve that ticket. Someone has to do that. But if our platform can go and remotely identify, remediate, and execute the changes over the internet the way it needs to without having any humans in the loop, I think those are the types of things that product managers need to think about as more like a GM, less like a PM.
JJ: Yeah. I could not love that advice more. It's something I've been trying to get product managers to, to do for many years because I think there's so much value in that. But now maybe we're in the environment that it's a forcing function. You do it or you're not there anymore. Not to be doomsday, but that's the new world.
It's a- again, an exciting time. I understand a fearful time for some, but it's ... I feel lucky to work in and around this, this problem that the world is solving.
Faisal: Completely agree.
JJ: Yeah. Faisal, thank you so much for joining me, for having this conversation. I know how busy you are, and to share your insights with the listeners is a great joy, and I appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining me on Product Voices.
Faisal: Of course. Thanks, JJ. Thanks for having me.
JJ: And thank you all for listening. See you on the next episode
