It's the feeling that the work is still happening — the decks are getting built, the briefs are going out, the campaigns are running — but the thing that made it feel strategically important is getting harder to point to.

You're still busy. You might even be more productive than you've ever been. But when you look at what you produced last quarter and ask yourself what made it valuable in a way that nobody else in the organization could have delivered, the answer doesn't land the way it used to.

I think I know what's driving it.

For most of the last decade, PMM's visibility inside an organization came from content production. You were the person who could take a complex product story and turn it into something a sales rep could actually use. You could write the competitive brief, build the launch deck, produce the positioning doc. That required skill, context, and time. It made you indispensable in a specific, legible way. People knew what you did because they could see what you made.

The artifacts were the proof of strategic work. The deck was the thinking. The brief was the clarity. The one-sheeter was how you distilled six months of product roadmap into something a seller could deliver in a discovery call.

AI didn't just speed that up. It democratized it.

Now the sales rep can generate a competitive brief. The demand gen manager can produce a positioning summary. The product manager can draft a launch narrative. Not perfectly, not with the strategic depth a good PMM brings — but well enough, fast enough, that the gap that used to justify PMM's seat at the table is narrowing in ways that are hard to ignore.

I'm not saying the output is better. I'm saying it's good enough in contexts where good enough is winning. A seller who can get a 70% accurate competitive breakdown in three minutes isn't waiting for PMM to deliver the 95% version next week. A product manager who can draft launch messaging that's directionally correct isn't blocking on your calendar availability.

The bar for "useful output" is being met in places it wasn't before. That changes the math on what PMM is for.

That's uncomfortable. But it's not actually the problem.

Here's the problem.

Every organization in your category has access to the same tools. The same models, the same capabilities, roughly the same outputs if you squint at them long enough. And those models were trained on the same corpus — the same analyst reports, the same G2 reviews, the same category blogs and conference talks and LinkedIn thought leadership that everyone in your space has been producing for years.

When you ask an AI to help you write positioning for your product, it draws from a shared pool of market language that your competitors are drawing from too.

The output layer isn't just getting faster. It's converging.

Click to zoom

Vendor content across entire categories is starting to sound like it came from the same place — because in a meaningful sense, it did. I've been running this experiment for months. Pick a category. Employee experience, marketing automation, sales enablement, whatever. Pull up five vendor websites. Read the hero messaging, the product descriptions, the customer proof points. Then ask yourself: if I removed the logos, could I tell these companies apart based on the words alone?

Most of the time, you can't.

It's not because the products are the same. It's because the language describing them has been pulled into the same gravitational center. Everyone is "AI-powered." Everyone "drives productivity." Everyone has "intuitive workflows" and "actionable insights" and "seamless integrations." The median has become the message.

I've been watching this happen in enterprise software for the past couple years and the pattern is pretty consistent. The organizations that leaned hardest into AI-generated content velocity are the ones whose messaging is most indistinguishable from the category average. They're producing more. It's landing less. The differentiation didn't follow the efficiency.

And here's what makes that particularly painful: a lot of those organizations do have real differentiation. Genuine product advantages. Architectural choices that matter. Customer outcomes that are hard to replicate. But you wouldn't know it from the content. The capability is there. The articulation of it has collapsed into category noise.

That's not an AI problem. It's a dependency problem. If your differentiation strategy relies on out-producing competitors in a content layer that everyone now has equal access to, you're not differentiating. You're just adding to the pile. And there's a second thing happening simultaneously that makes this more urgent, not less.

Product velocity is accelerating in ways that are genuinely hard to process.

Teams that used to ship quarterly are shipping weekly. Features that used to require months of GTM preparation are dropping faster than any field team can absorb them. I'm talking to PMMs who are being asked to position three major product releases in the same quarter while also supporting ongoing campaigns, enablement programs, competitive shifts, analyst briefings, and everything else that was already on the board.

Click to zoom

The amount of product surface area a seller is expected to know, a buyer is expected to evaluate, a PMM is expected to position — it's expanding faster than the traditional content production model can handle.

So you get the math problem everyone's living with right now: more to explain, less time to explain it, and a content layer that's converging toward sameness even as the product layer is expanding toward complexity.

You can't solve that with velocity alone. Producing more faster just amplifies the convergence problem. Your 47th AI-assisted one-pager isn't creating clarity. It's creating volume in a market that's already drowning in it.

So you have two forces running in opposite directions. More to explain. Less differentiation in how anyone is explaining anything.

That's where the anxiety is actually coming from.

Not "will AI replace me." It's "the thing I built my professional visibility around is under pressure from both sides simultaneously, and I'm not sure the answer is just to produce more content faster."

It isn't.

But that's a conversation for the next post.

I'm speaking at the Product Marketing Alliance Seattle Summit on June 17th on exactly this — what PMM is actually for in a post-AI world, and what the answer looks like in practice. If you're going to be there, come find me. Use the link to register.