DoP Deep: The AI companies that want to replace us
And how to use these new tools to accelerate your product development velocity
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive them you can do so below. Or you can find out more about what you get as a paid subscriber here.
Hi product people 👋,
Are product teams under threat?
Ever since Nvidia’s CEO told students not to bother to learn how to code because programming will likely be replaced by AI in the near future, we’ve seen several other new companies launch with the explicit goal of replacing traditional product team members.
A startup called Magic said it wants to create a coworker rather than a copilot and last week a new company called Devin from Cognition Labs proved to be rather controversial as it unveiled what it called the “first AI software engineer”. Some commentators have outright refused to promote any company who expressly states its goal is to replace engineers and others have looked on with bemusement (and fear) as AI continues to break benchmark records.
And that’s what this DoP Deep dive is all about: the new companies looking to replace or augment product team members including engineers, product managers and product designers.
We’ll take a closer look at some of the AI companies who are seeking to replace or augment us across each of these disciplines - and perhaps more importantly - we’ll figure out how you can use these tools to improve your product development velocity in the meantime.
Coming up:
Understanding the current climate of fear about the future
The new AI companies transforming the product development process from product design and product management to engineering and customer support
How AI engineering benchmark tests work
Spotlight: A deeper look at Magic, Devin and other tools who could replace human workers
What does the future look like? Some perspectives explored
The list of companies and features in full for you to review
The current climate of fear and opportunity
The tech environment is experiencing an odd paradox at the moment; on one hand, it’s one of the most exciting times to work in the industry thanks to the AI boom and on the other, just like the dotcom boom years, we’re seeing companies wiped out and lay offs at record levels.
209 tech companies have laid off more than 50,000 employees this year and in 2023, 1,191 companies laid off 269,000 workers.
But it’s far too easy to get bogged down in the negative discourse right now. As with any technological revolution, the opportunities created are vast - and we’re still not entirely sure what these will be.
Many engineers think we are a long, long way away from engineers being replaced by AI, but as we’ve recently seen with other industries like design, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can disrupt assumptions very quickly.
Will engineers and other product team members still exist in 10 years time? Perhaps not in the traditional sense. But as we’ll see, despite some of the rhetoric, the new companies emerging to replace us aren’t quite there yet.
The new companies and features transforming the product development process
We’ve put together a curated list of some of the world’s top companies that are looking to replace or augment roles within tech. For this Deep dive we’ve focused predominantly on the core product team roles including:
Software engineers
Product managers
Product designers
Data analysts
It’s important to note here that for some companies, their goal is not to replace team members but to augment them by boosting their productivity. For others, they are pitching themselves as an additional team member which ultimately could mean replacing a traditional worker.
Here’s a snapshot of the companies covered. We’ve included the full list at the end of this post.
Now let’s take a closer look at some of these companies and explore whether or not they can replace product team roles including software engineering, product management and design.
Company spotlight: a closer look at some of the companies
We’ll focus on 4 different companies who have recently launched AI offerings. And we’ll start with the new tool that everyone’s been talking about this past week.
Cognition’s Devin
Role it can augment or replace: Software engineer