The PM's Second Brain: How AI Becomes Your Personal Chief of Staff

What if your AI knew your meetings, your goals, and your patterns, and had everything ready before you even opened your laptop? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Denise Hemke, Rise2.AI Founder Vikash Rungta will be speaking on how product managers can build a "second brain", an AI-powered knowledge system that acts as a personal chief of staff. Vikash shares the exact framework for getting started, the most common mistakes PMs make, and why ingestion matters far more than generation.

Can AI truly be your co-founder, or is that a role only a human can fill? In this podcast hosted by Hoda Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Up My Mojo and a Board Member at Products That Count, KC Advisors Executive Leadership Coach Keith Cowing will be speaking on what AI still can't do when it comes to building companies and teams. Drawing on his experience as a former CPO at LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flatiron Health, Keith shares a framework for what makes a great co-founder and whether AI, or an alternative profile, could ever step into that role.

How can product and engineering leaders actually prove the ROI of AI adoption when everyone is being asked to justify the investment but few teams have a clear measurement playbook? In this podcast hosted by Hoda Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Up My Mojo and a Board Member at Products That Count, Pensero AI Co-Founder Bernardo Hernandez will be speaking on how to measure productivity gains from AI in a way that is rigorous, practical, and useful for annual planning cycles. As tools like Cursor and Claude Code promise 3 to 10× productivity gains in engineering, leadership teams are moving quickly to allocate budgets and set expectations, while product leaders are being asked to benchmark progress and quantify impact without clear precedents. This conversation explores how experienced operators are approaching that challenge and what it takes to turn AI productivity claims into measurable results that teams can confidently use for planning and decision-making.

How are Chief Product Officers redesigning their org charts and ways of working to build truly AI-native product teams? In this podcast hosted by Hoda Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Up My Mojo and a Board Member at Products That Count, Monumental Chief Product Officer Pawan Gaargi will be speaking on how product leaders are transforming their teams to operate in the AI era. As organizations move beyond using AI as a feature-level tool and begin rethinking how products are built, shipped, and managed, product leaders are being asked to reshape processes, decision-making, and collaboration across their teams. Drawing from his experience scaling teams and rebuilding workflows through acquisitions at Monumental and from his early product leadership roots at Zynga, Pawan shares how experimentation, hypothesis-driven thinking, and hands-on leadership are helping teams become AI-native while keeping core product fundamentals like retention, player motivation, and growth metrics firmly in focus.

How can companies stop losing revenue because marketing, inventory, and operations are working from disconnected data? In this podcast hosted by EY Chief Platform Officer Justin Leibow, Conative.ai Founder Mike Le discusses how AI-driven demand forecasting helps organizations align teams, improve decision-making, and increase cash-flow efficiency. He also explores why clean, connected data matters more than models alone, and how AI agents are reshaping the way product, marketing, and inventory teams collaborate to act faster and smarter.

How can sustainable feedstock materials reshape manufacturing while accelerating climate progress? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this podcast, host Silicon Valley Bank (a division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech & Sustainability SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing Mothership Materials CEO & Co-Founder Jo Marini to discuss producing sustainable feedstock materials, the importance of customer discovery and building stakeholder relationships and finding joy in product development. 

How can enterprises unlock AI adoption while keeping sensitive data secure? In this podcast hosted by Boston New Technology CPO Shweta Agrawal, Polygraf AI Head of Product Anar Bayramov discusses how organizations can manage AI risk, protect data flows, and build governance into their AI strategy from the start. He shares lessons from building in regulated environments, explains why visibility into AI usage is the foundation of trust, and explores how product leaders can shift the conversation from fear-driven security to enabling responsible AI at scale.

How do product leaders decide what AI should automate and what should stay human-in-the-loop? In this podcast hosted by Mphasis VP of Products Chenny Solaiyappan, Level AI Head of Product Sirisha Machiraju will be speaking on how teams move AI from experimentation to strategic priority while balancing trust, adoption, and risk in enterprise environments. She also shares a practical playbook for evaluating assistive vs. agentic workflows and explains how conversation intelligence is reshaping customer experience across industries, including healthcare.

How can product leaders cut through AI hype to build products that actually deliver value? In this podcast hosted by Boston New Technology CPO Shweta Agrawal, Former Amazon, PayPal & Target Product Leader West Stringfellow will be speaking on how to apply AI with a product-first mindset. Drawing from decades of experience scaling global platforms, he shares how to balance innovation with discipline, avoid overestimating AI capabilities, and focus on what truly drives customer impact and business growth.

What does it take to build AI-powered products that customers actually trust? In this podcast hosted by EY Chief Platform Officer Justin Leibow, Unit21 Sr Product Leader Dhiraj Bhat will be speaking on how product leaders can design systems that leverage AI effectively. Drawing from his experience building fraud prevention products, Dhiraj explores the shift from feature-driven PM to systems thinking, and why implementation and trust will define the winners in AI.