Are product managers all going to be out of a job, or is product management more important than ever? That is the provocative question Koen Boncquet posed at PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Ghent. As a Group Product Manager at HubSpot, a company with $3B ARR and 275K customers, Koen has a front-row seat to both the promise and the hype surrounding AI.
Rather than fueling the panic or dismissing it, Koen walked the audience through a grounded perspective on where AI actually stands today, why we consistently get the timelines wrong, and what this means for the evolving role of the product manager. His core argument: the abstraction level of work is increasing, teams are getting smaller, and the PMs who thrive will be the ones who develop judgement, taste, and specific knowledge rather than just learning to prompt.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
The Most Successful Marketing Campaign of All Time
Koen started with a provocation: rebranding linear algebra as artificial intelligence was the most successful marketing campaign of all time. By placing AI on a simplified timeline from its coining in 1956 by McCarthy and Minsky, through the 2012 ImageNet moment when things started getting interesting, to the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, Koen showed that the field has a long history of overpromising on timelines.
