Shifting Mindsets: Building with AI

A few years ago, AI was mostly a buzzword, something associated with cutting-edge research, robotics, and futuristic concepts. It felt like a distant technology, exciting but not something that had a direct impact on my work as a product manager. But gradually, AI started to weave itself into everyday life.

It wasn’t just in voice assistants or recommendation algorithms; AI was making decisions behind the scenes; filtering emails, predicting supply chain disruptions, optimizing customer support responses. And now, it’s reshaping the way businesses operate, not just in how employees work but in how they manage their lives.

That realization hit me when I started working on integrating AI into business travel. It was no longer about optimizing an existing process or improving efficiency , it was about rethinking how business travel should work in an AI-driven world.

AI Is Not Just About Productivity; It’s About a New Way of Working

There’s a common misconception that AI exists purely to automate tasks and make employees more productive. But its potential goes beyond that. AI can shift the entire mental model of how work is structured.

In business travel, for example, the traditional approach is built around manual workflows:

• Employees book their own flights and hotels.
• They submit expenses for reimbursement.
• Travel approvals follow a structured hierarchy.

AI doesn’t just make these steps more efficient. It challenges whether they need to exist at all.

Imagine a system that:

• Identifies when an executive needs to travel and suggests options before they even make a request.
• Understands travel trends of the organization, suggesting budges and projections for travel within departments.
• Handles compliance, approvals flow control and company travel policies.

This isn’t about removing decision-making within organizations; it’s about removing friction. AI isn’t just a tool; it’s an approach that allows businesses to operate in a way that feels seamless.

When I first started working on AI-driven solutions, I realized that the traditional way I approached product management wasn’t going to work. AI doesn’t play by the same rules as web-based platforms or predefined workflows. Instead of focusing on feature sets and user journeys, I had to shift my mindset to focus on systems that learn, adapt, and anticipate needs.

This shift wasn’t immediate. I had spent time refining a structured approach to product development; analyzing user pain points, defining use cases, designing predictable interactions. But AI is dynamic. It doesn’t follow predefined paths; it learns and evolves.

The biggest challenge for me was letting go of the idea that I needed to control every part of the user experience. Instead of designing step-by-step workflows, I had to start thinking in terms of outcomes. Instead of asking:

How can we make booking travel more efficient?

How can AI remove the need for manual booking altogether?

This meant rethinking everything, from how approvals work to how we integrate AI into decision-making without making users feel like they’ve lost control.

At Firnas, our goal isn’t just to automate business travel; it’s to redesign it from the ground up. Instead of forcing employees to adapt to a rigid process, we are building AI-powered systems that adapt to them.

That means developing solutions that:

• Anticipate travel needs instead of waiting for employees to request bookings.
• Automate approvals while maintaining flexibility for policy exceptions.
• Offer real-time recommendations that balance cost, convenience, and policy compliance.
• Provide proactive support for last-minute changes, delays, and unexpected disruptions.

These are the types of problems that AI is uniquely suited to solve. And as a product manager, my role isn’t just to build AI features it’s to rethink how AI fits into the broader experience of business travel.

Adopting AI in product development requires more than just learning how to implement machine learning models. It requires a fundamental shift in how we think about problem-solving.

For me, this journey has been about unlearning traditional product management principles and embracing a new way of thinking. AI challenges us to design adaptive, intelligent systems rather than linear user flows. It forces us to ask better questions, not just about what users need, but about what’s possible when we remove friction entirely to serve that need.

As AI continues to evolve, so will the role of product managers. The challenge isn’t just about understanding AI; it’s about learning how to build with it, think with it, and create systems that feel intuitive, natural, and effortless.

That’s what we’re working on at Firnas. And every day, I’m learning that the real shift isn’t in the technology itself, it’s in how we choose to think about it.