Product Leaders Growth Forum: AI as an Operational Co-Pilot for Product Teams

In November 2025, Perpetuate hosted its Product Leaders Growth Forum on AI as an Operational Co-Pilot for Product Teams. It was a full house, so we ran two concurrent sessions over Zoom for CPOs, VPs and Heads of Product from across Australia. Sophia Philippou co-hosted and facilitated with Matt Adney.

The Question: Where Does AI Belong in Product Operations?

Sophia's framing was that AI is moving from hype to habit. Both sessions looked at team augmentation, automation and adoption across three areas:

• Strategy development: accelerating market research, unlocking internal knowledge, drafting strategy documents and prioritising value bets.
• Discovery: feedback triage at scale, analytics co-pilots, automated research synthesis, user story mapping and early planning.
• Delivery enablement: AI-enabled design acceleration, meeting capture to action, backlog hygiene and story quality, experimentation co-pilots, incident summarisation and team communications.

A Co-Pilot, Not the Pilot

One theme came through clearly across both sessions. As Sophia put it in her recap, "AI is no longer optional in Product Ops, however, success hinges on experimentation, trust, and shared learning."

AI is increasingly becoming the co-pilot in Product Operations but not the pilot.

Sophia Philippou, Perpetuate, in her recap of the forum.

The uses leaders described were practical. AI works as a research assistant and "wargaming" partner for ideas, not the author of original strategy. It handles customer feedback analysis, interview transcription and synthesis, and automated customer responses. It speeds up prototyping and validation for quick proofs of concept, gives regulatory guidance at compliance checkpoints, and takes on low-risk chores such as code documentation. Full AI-driven design systems into code remain rare.

Where Adoption Stands Today

AI Ops is largely being led by Product Leaders, but the most effective teams empower AI champions to own and evolve processes from the ground up. Consensus strongly favoured bottom-up experimentation over top-down directives. Almost every Product Leader and PM uses AI individually, yet systemised, organisation-wide adoption remains uncommon.

What the Leaders Making Progress Are Doing

• Treating AI initiatives like products: discovery, MVP, iterate, then scale.
• Keeping governance light: lightweight AI Centres of Excellence focused on enablement and fast pilots, not gatekeeping. One can also centralise security, legal and compliance sign-off templates.
• Working across functions: AI working groups across Product, Engineering, QA and Design to pilot safely.
• Making room to experiment: time set aside for experimentation and rapid tool evaluation, plus a rolling view of pilot tools, licences and active experiments.
• Sharing small wins: surfacing reusable patterns and building internal advocates.
• Starting low-risk: high-volume tasks first, to build trust and momentum.
• Training people: curated learning paths in prompting, agent basics and data handling.

Dedicated product operations or AI enablement roles also came up as an accelerator, and often become a full-time focus.

We run the Perpetuate Growth Series for conversations like this one: candid, peer-level and invitation-only, for senior product, design and marketing leaders across Australia. Thank you to Matt Adney for facilitating, and to everyone who joined and shared so openly. Sophia leads Perpetuate's Product search practice, and more of our forums and lunches are listed on the events page.