By: Gesche Haas, founder & CEO of Dreamers & Doers, a highly curated community and PR Hype Machine™ for extraordinary women entrepreneurs.
Traditionally, the product development process has been slow and expensive, and it doesn’t always yield a result that’s a guaranteed winner for customers. The road from ideating to building to testing is rarely linear and risk-free, an endlessly frustrating reality for ambitious founders who want to make an impact.
Recently, though, new developments in technology have proven themselves powerful product partners. AI tools can be used to validate and refine ideas, and even to bring them to market. Using artificial intelligence in this space often means that founders can make strides in product development without committing resources they don’t yet have.
Leaders and founders from the Dreamers & Doers community share the strategies that have allowed them to put AI to work in this often underestimated function.
Developing a product has to start with an idea, but it’s rarely as simple as it sounds. Founders also must find ways to effectively evaluate their ideas, and artificial intelligence has proven to be a useful filter in precisely those moments.
Relatable Nonprofit co-founder Catalina Parker worked with her team to embed AI into product development as what she calls a “go/no-go engine.”
“We feed it competitor research, our ideal customer profile and our three- to five-year business plan, then run new product concepts through a structured prompt to pressure-test differentiation, pricing, packaging and the tightest angle before we build,” Parker says. “It is not idea generation; it is a faster filter that keeps us from chasing shiny objects.”
Like Parker, Lucy Bedewi has found this technology to be a key tool in an effort to move away from chasing concepts based on gut feelings and focusing instead on clear, validated data. As the messaging strategist and copywriter of My Write Hand Woman, she’s started using AI to help with pricing when creating new offers and services.
“I think it’s easy to over or under-inflate prices based on the headspace we’re in, but AI often gives me really great advice on what I should charge based on similar offers in the market,” Bedewi says.
Once the seed of an idea has been planted, AI platforms can go to work extracting patterns from real customer behavior and feedback at scale, ensuring that a team’s effort is geared toward what will actually work in the market.
“We use AI to analyze patterns across customer conversations, support tickets, and facility work orders to identify operational problems that appear repeatedly across locations,” says Demi Oloyede, founder and CEO of LeanSite. “Those insights are fed directly into our product roadmap so we build features around the highest-frequency issues facilities teams face.”
LeanSite’s product releases have been prioritized based on this information, shortening the feedback loop between customer insights and product development.
Simply Shady CEO Simone Steele has taken a similar approach with AI and product development, using the evolving technology to analyze thousands of skincare reviews, dermatology forums, and social conversations to identify recurring pain points around the lack of inclusive sunscreen shades.
“These insights directly informed the shade range and corrective ingredient strategy behind Simply Shady,” Steele says. “As a result, we accelerated product validation and saw stronger early customer alignment, driving higher engagement and repeat purchase intent from launch.”
Platforms like Claude have dramatically lowered the barrier to building and launching products. Clandestine Events + Experiences founder Kelley Troia used it to build an entire web application from scratch without an outside developer or agency.
“I had basic HTML knowledge from years ago, but AI turned me into someone who could ship a real product,” she says. “Not enough founders realize AI can replace an entire development team if you’re willing to sit in the build with it. It saved me thousands in development costs and months of timeline.”
Some founders are, of course, finding inspiration in the field of artificial intelligence, using their expertise and resources to build AI-native products tailored to specific users or organizations. Better Together Agency founder and CEO Catharine Montgomery built a private AI platform trained on each of her client organization’s own data, brand voice and documents.
“Teams get usable outputs with zero prompting required,” she says. Montgomery adds that the platform has significantly compressed campaign planning timelines and enabled her clients’ teams to take on greater workloads with less manual effort.
Or take Naomi Wynter, CEO and co-founder of AI-powered wedding planning platform The Two Do List.
“We use AI to surface the relationship dynamics behind wedding planning,” Wynter says. “By analyzing patterns in how couples interact with tasks and decisions, the platform can suggest more balanced responsibilities and prompt alignment conversations in real time, turning wedding planning into a collaborative experience instead of just a checklist.”
The next wave of products is more than just AI-enabled. Instead, it’s AI-native and deeply customized, shifting the model from static offerings to adaptive, context-aware tools built around the people who use them.
All individuals featured in this article are members of Dreamers & Doers, a highly curated community and PR Hype Machine™ amplifying extraordinary women entrepreneurs and leaders through authentic connections, credibility-boosting visibility, and opportunities that accelerate big dreams.
