Artificial intelligence is now front and center on product roadmaps across sectors. It's even making many executives reconsider their product strategy. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers' June 2024 Pulse Survey, 82% of U.S. CEOs say the average company won't survive the next decade if they fail to meet the changes that AI brings. AI is changing what is possible and creating new opportunities; however, only 41% of executives in that same survey said there is alignment on how to achieve their updated product vision.
Sometimes, companies will create new, AI-powered features without thoroughly thinking them through. In the rush to get ahead of competition and get closer to their vision, they actually set themselves back. AI alone won't differentiate a product, nor is AI tool usage itself a strategy. Here are the top mistakes companies make that can interfere with a winning product strategy, plus how to avoid them.
Copying Competitors' AI Features As A Product Strategy
It's good to keep an eye on your competitors. However, you don't want to accidentally copy their mistakes like a student copying wrong answers off of someone else's test. AI features that are getting buzz are not always getting good word-of-mouth feedback from customers. By the time the company you're copying is preparing to sunset a failed AI feature, you may have already wasted tons of time, resources, and development copying them.
In the much cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology State of AI in Business 2025 study, a key reason many generative AI pilots failed was “due to brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.” In other words, applying AI without considering how it fits.
Instead, see how your competitors' AI product choices are signaling a change in strategy, or even departing from a clear focus altogether. Understanding if your competitors are building features that align with their strategy, or are chasing shiny objects, is good information for your company to better understand the changes in the market. Even if their AI features seem to fit their existing strategy, or signal a worthwhile strategy shift, that doesn't mean that strategy is the right one for your company or that you should copy their features. Think twice before you mimic another company's approach to AI.
Misjudging Customers' Willingness To Forgive AI Mistakes
When Apple built their AI notification summaries, they took on an ambitious problem. Their AI notification summaries got details wrong enough times that it eroded user trust. Some users even tweeted the questionable summaries Apple sent them. “Apple Intelligence's notification summaries keep insisting I have a husband when summarizing messages from my wife,” tweeted Joanna Stern, senior personal tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal. This ultimately resulted in Apple temporarily pausing the feature and reducing the scope.
Either Apple thought users would be more forgiving of AI's mistakes, or misjudged how big the variance in accuracy would be for such a large user base over a variety of notification topics. One of Apple's assets has historically been its reputation for being great at building intuitive, well-designed products. Their AI notifications feature clashed against that asset, rather than leveraging it.
Companies should assess what in their product is a good fit for using AI. They should find opportunities where there is more tolerance for inaccuracy, pick a problem where there is a defined dataset to define what “good” looks like, or put in the extra time to build the new feature to a reliable level, where it aligns with their product strategy.
The AI Strategists' Sin Of Low Hanging Fruit
One of the other things companies look for with AI is “low hanging fruit,” often without considering if that low hanging fruit is worth pursuing. Rushing to the fastest and easiest features to implement creates sub-par results for businesses. It results in features that seem intriguing on first glance, but ultimately leave users disappointed.
LinkedIn added AI prompt questions below posts for their premium users, but many users found those prompts unhelpful. Christopher Zara, the news director for Fast Company, shared in a Fast Company article that at one point a LinkedIn prompt asked “What can I gain from pumpkin spice?” By September 2024, less than one year after LinkedIn announced the arrival of the feature, LinkedIn started rolling it back.
Companies shouldn't necessarily shun opportunities that are quicker than bigger AI initiatives. However, they should consider if these “easier” opportunities are worth putting resources into. It may be better to prioritize harder initiatives instead if there are other features that customers may need or opportunities that leverage the organization's competitive strengths.
Assessing Where AI Should Fit Into Your Product Strategy
Companies can build AI features that customers love and still struggle. If features aren't aligned with their product strategy in terms of market positioning, segmentation, and leveraging what differentiates them, it could put them in a position of constantly battling against competitors who can easily copy AI features. This happens when the new AI features aren't a part of a unique value chain for the company. Or even worse, the AI tools could work against the company's core value proposition.
The real question for businesses is: what can we uniquely do with AI given our data, our customer relationships, and our domain expertise? Not ‘what generic AI feature can we bolt on?’ Companies that figure that out will create real moats, while the ones just checking boxes will be left with features nobody uses.
It's important for a company to understand where their focus is from their product strategy perspective, and to ensure their AI investments reflect that focus. It's easy to get distracted, but hard to catch up once you're behind from building the wrong features in your product.
Building AI into your product can be a win for the business and customers. On the other hand, it needs to be thoughtfully aligned with product strategy. AI features and products that clash with product strategy can break trust with customers or put your business in a position that feels like it can never get ahead. Building with focus and aligned with unique business assets, AI can set the business apart.