AI exposes lazy product marketers

The future of PMM: AI automates the mechanics, and exposes who can actually do the craft.

👋 Hi, I’m James. I write Building Momentum to help you accelerate B2B SaaS growth through product marketing, GTM strategy, sales, and marketing.

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Every week there’s a new screenshot on LinkedIn: someone pastes a half-baked prompt into ChatGPT, gets a polished paragraph back, and declares the end of marketing as we know it.

It makes for good engagement bait, but it misses the point.

AI is incredible at processing content. It can rewrite, reframe, and remix faster than any of us. But it doesn’t understand the same way you do.

It doesn’t know the pressure your buyer is under from their CFO. It doesn’t know the difference between a “feature” that looks good in a deck and a “capability” that can define someone’s career. It doesn’t know the subtle gap between what your product does and what your buyer cares about.

That’s the part only a product marketer can do. And that's exactly why AI will expose lazy product marketing, and the lazy PMMs behind it.

The 90% vs the 10%

A tweet I saw nailed it:

I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate.

- @KentBeck on X

The 90%? Drafting headlines, generating alternatives, summarizing content. The stuff that feels like “work” but is really just mechanics. AI eats that for breakfast.

The 10% that matters?

Knowing which headline actually lands with a VP of HR vs a hiring manager.

Knowing when to push on aspiration (“build the future of your company”) and when to hammer on utility (“approve time off requests in seconds”).

Knowing how to turn a product feature into value that speaks across personas.

That’s the work AI can’t do... and where your leverage comes alive.

Why your taste matters more than ever

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some product marketers don't have great taste to begin with.

They hid behind laundry lists of features. They recycled the same “save time, save money, do more strategic work” tropes. They defaulted to “seamless” and “easy to use” without ever asking why it matters.

AI will happily crank out more of the same. If you don’t have a strong point of view, you’ll drown in blandness.

Lazy product marketing was already ineffective. With AI, it gets exposed for what it is.

What makes the difference is taste. Knowing the difference between copy that looks fine on the page and messaging that changes how someone thinks.

Taste comes from three places:

• Pattern recognition: shipping enough launches to know what works and what flops.

• Buyer psychology: understanding your buyers and what they value (better than anyone else)

• Curiosity: going deeper in discovery calls, asking the questions that unlock the tension, the politics, the career stakes: the human drivers behind a deal.

That taste is the multiplier. AI makes it easier to generate raw material... which means you can spend more of your time choosing, shaping, and sharpening.

The future is curation, not creation

The biggest shift AI brings is not “replace the PMM.” It’s “change what part of the job creates leverage.”

Creation used to be the bottleneck. Getting to a decent draft was slow. Now? That’s the easy bit.

The bottleneck is curation. Picking the right angle, cutting what’s weak, elevating what’s strong, aligning it with strategy. That’s where momentum comes from.

So if you’re in product marketing, stop worrying about whether AI makes you obsolete. Start asking yourself:

• Am I spending 80% of my time in the 90% bucket, tweaking outputs anyone could make?

• Or am I building leverage in the 10%, sharpening taste, judgment, and insight into what really drives buyer behavior?

AI is not the end of product marketing. It is the end of lazy product marketing.