CTO AI Corner: How is AI changing the role of Product Owner?

AI tools are quietly reshaping what it means to be a Product Owner. Traditionally, many POs have focused on gathering business requirements and prioritizing them for technical teams. They have acted as translators between stakeholders and developers, which has often meant long feedback loops and plenty of ambiguity at the start. AI changes this.

Today, a PO can explore ideas much further before involving the technical team. With AI tools, they can quickly create rough prototypes, validate use cases with stakeholders, and refine the business case early. If AI has access to documentation and code, it can also surface technical constraints, data gaps, and dependencies before they turn into expensive surprises.

AI can even help with rough estimates and dependency mapping, allowing POs to prioritize and budget ideas more realistically. The result is that ideas reaching the technical team are clearer, better validated, and less likely to collapse on first contact with implementation.

This does not eliminate the need for collaboration with architects and developers, but it reduces the number of iterations needed to get started.

Implementation is changing too. As AI accelerated development produces results faster, there is more to review and refine in shorter cycles. This opens the door for POs to be more involved during development, for example joining quick prototyping sessions or early reviews to give end user focused feedback while changes are still easy to make.

Overall, AI provides Product Owners with better tools to identify ideas that can actually succeed, communicate domain knowledge through rapid prototypes, and avoid obvious technical pitfalls. Less guessing, more shipping.

January 22, 2026
ai-corner
Authors
Tomi Leppälahti
CAIO & CTO
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