6. AI Research & Market Intelligence
Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2026 9:34 am
6. AI Research & Market Intelligence
Where the previous categories focus on your own customers and data, this category is about understanding the outside world quickly and credibly: competitors, market sizing, industry trends, and technical landscape scans. Tools like Perplexity function as an 'answer engine' rather than a search engine — returning a synthesised, cited answer instead of ten blue links — which matters for PM work because sourced claims can go straight into a competitive brief or exec deck without a separate fact-checking pass. The core value proposition for a Products team is speed of credible answer: turning a half-day of manual competitor research or market-sizing work into a focused 15-30 minute session, while keeping enough of a paper trail (citations) that the findings hold up under stakeholder scrutiny.
Where the previous categories focus on your own customers and data, this category is about understanding the outside world quickly and credibly: competitors, market sizing, industry trends, and technical landscape scans. Tools like Perplexity function as an 'answer engine' rather than a search engine — returning a synthesised, cited answer instead of ten blue links — which matters for PM work because sourced claims can go straight into a competitive brief or exec deck without a separate fact-checking pass. The core value proposition for a Products team is speed of credible answer: turning a half-day of manual competitor research or market-sizing work into a focused 15-30 minute session, while keeping enough of a paper trail (citations) that the findings hold up under stakeholder scrutiny.