If you’ve written a Product brief recently, there’s a good chance it included a line about AI literacy, even for a role that has nothing to do with an AI product.
That pattern is turning up across the market, and it changes what’s worth screening for at interview, because talking about AI and doing something useful with it are not the same skill.
What’s moving off a PM’s plate, and what’s replacing it
AI is absorbing a lot of the administrative layer of product work: drafting requirements and managing backlogs. That’s freeing PMs to spend more of their time on higher-value work, strategic thinking, customer understanding and decision-making.
For a hiring manager, that means the candidate in front of you should be spending less time on documentation and more of it on judgement calls about what to build and why.
If a candidate’s whole story is still about how thoroughly they write a PRD, that’s worth a follow-up question.
That reflects a real change in what good looks like in the role, worth weighing directly when assessing a candidate’s experience at interview.
A PM who can talk fluently about backlog process but struggles to describe how they’ve influenced a product direction or built a case with customers is showing you a skill set that’s becoming less central to the job.
The interview question that separates real AI experience from CV keywords
The candidates worth shortlisting can point to practical experience in three areas:
- Identifying where AI could genuinely help a product
- Working alongside technical teams to test that
- Understanding where AI’s limitations mean it isn’t the right answer
That third point is worth pushing on, since it often carries the most signal in an interview.
Ask for a specific example of a time a candidate identified where AI should not be used in a product, alongside where it should. The answer will tell you more about their AI literacy than any line on their CV.
Why AI literacy is appearing in briefs that aren’t AI roles
AI literacy is now appearing in briefs for roles that were never meant to be AI Product Manager roles. What matters is whether the candidate has a working point of view on where AI genuinely belongs in a product and where it doesn’t.
PMs are increasingly expected to push back on adding AI for its own sake, and to know how to brief one in well.
If your brief includes an AI literacy line, it’s worth being clear with yourself about which of those two things you’re screening for, because they filter for different candidates.
Ready to talk about your next product hire? Get in touch.
Katie
Product, Data & Delivery Recruitment
Last updated: September 2026
