Many product development teams are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up individual work, automate repetitive tasks, and analyze customer information for insights. But because AI is largely being used to achieve efficiency gains on an individual level, teams have barely begun to tap its strategic potential to accelerate and improve product development and boost innovation.
AI has the potential to unlock improvements across every stage of the product development process— and doing so will only become more important because organizations know their current product development life cycles need improvement. In a September 2025 Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of 332 members of the Harvard Business Review audience, all of whom are knowledgeable about and involved in making decisions about their organization’s product development, 34% say their organization’s current approach to product development is highly effective at producing the desired results. Another 16% describe the current approach as not very or not at all effective.