The AI stories we're not telling
For those of you who attended Product at Heart 2026, this may sound familiar. I've decided to reshare my opening remarks here because they feel just as relevant today and I think this is a message that's worth getting out there to as many people as possible.
When OpenAI unveiled a new ChatGPT voice interface in 2024, Sam Altman posted one word on X. "her." This simple post earned 21 million views.
He wasn't describing a product feature. He was pointing at a 2013 Spike Jonze movie called Her, in which a man falls in love with his AI assistant. Jonze wrote it as a meditation on loneliness, on what happens when technology starts filling the spaces that human relationships leave behind.
It was not written as a product spec. And yet here was the CEO of one of the most influential AI companies in the world, pointing at it and saying: This is the direction. This is what we're building toward.
Joaquin Phoenix in Her (2013). Warner Bros. Pictures
That's not a one-off.
A lot of the loudest AI narratives right now were never written as roadmaps. Some of them were written explicitly as warnings—hello Black Mirror—and they're being treated as blueprints anyway.
I get why. Things feel overwhelming right now, and people tend to look everywhere for orientation when uncertainty is threatening their routines, their jobs even. And the doomsday narratives are the most easily available ones. They are everywhere.
But I don't think we have to or should accept any of these versions of the future where AI might replace human judgment in some areas, where AI might be raising our kids through voice interfaces—but not in a good way—as an inevitable future. There is a real difference between taking a risk seriously (I’m as concerned as you might be!) and treating the current narratives as a future that is already written.
Here's the reframe I keep coming back to: The future isn't a place out there, waiting to happen to us. It's a story. One that gets told and retold, until someone starts building toward it.
Which means the stories we choose to amplify actually matter. With this episode of my newsletter, I would like to encourage you to do exactly that. Find positive stories around AI in your environment—as small as they might look from your perspective—and share them.
I find it helpful to use “beauty” as a lens to identify these stories and to make sure they are not contributing to the darker visions. What process has been optimized in a way that it now looks beautiful on paper? Or which customer problem has been solved in a way that's so beautifully simple it creates a sense of awe in the customer?
There are stories out there—in your industry, your organization, maybe even in your own product work—where technology made someone's life better.
Find them. Then tell it to the mountain!
Share them on LinkedIn, in your team retros, in your one-on-ones, at dinner tonight. The dystopian narratives travel fast because fear spreads easily. The bright ones need a push.
And in the best companies, the best product organizations, you are not only highlighting the beautiful things that have already been built. In a great product organization, you as a leader would aim to be the one who’s designing better, beautiful narratives about a future that is AI aided—or at least a brighter one. Because, and I’m quoting futurist Johannes Kleske here from our Product at Heart Leadership Event: “If we don't invent the future, someone else will do it for us. And it will be their future, not ours.”
What you're doing already counts
I suspect many of you are further along with this than you think.
Over the last three or four months, I've had a lot of conversations with product leaders about what they're actually doing with AI inside their organizations. Almost every one of them waved it off as nothing special. Nothing big. And almost every time I sat there thinking: That is not nothing.
Teams finding a way to cut the busywork out of how they collaborate. Someone reworking a process that used to eat a day a week. A product experience reshaped so the person using it just gets where they were going faster.
I think I know why it gets waved off. There's a widely held assumption right now that everyone else is already using AI everywhere, that you're behind, that it's all table stakes by now.
From where I sit, that isn't true.
Plenty of companies are still working out which AI use cases would even be worth having, the ones that make work more pleasant or customers more successful, rather than just doing things more cheaply.
So if you have something that works, something you're proud of behind closed doors, but haven’t yet shared publicly, I'd love to nudge you into putting it out into the world. That could be:
a short post on your company blog or on your LinkedIn page
a pitch to one of the bigger product management blogs or podcasts
taking the stage at a product event
And if we're already working together, come to me with it. I'm happy to help you shape the pitch, and I know a few of the people on the receiving end of them. If that's easier, I'll publish it on my blog instead. Your story, your name on it.
Because if all of us keep deciding our own work is nothing special, then all of us go without the practical examples—the ones that show what actually worked and what it took.
Please share the things you've built that work.