AI agents have gone mainstream

Dan Olsen is a product management consultant, educator, and author best known for his work on product-market fit. A veteran of the Mind the Product community, he runs hands-on AI workshops for product teams across industries — battle-testing tools so busy PMs don't have to. In this episode of Now Shipping, Dan joins host Mike Belsito to dissect the biggest AI story of the past month — Google I/O — and examine what the rapid expansion of agentic tools means for product managers navigating an increasingly automated world of work.

We discuss:
— How Gemini Spark, Google Stitch, and Antigravity collectively signal that Google has moved from playing catch-up to serious competition with Anthropic and OpenAI
— The clear arc of the agentic arms race: OpenClaw showed what was possible, Claude Cowork made it accessible, and Gemini Spark is Google's bid to own the personal AI agent space
— Why running agents in the cloud — not just on a laptop — solves real reliability problems for knowledge workers
— How the bottleneck in software development is shifting from engineering to product management, and why that makes strong PM judgment more valuable, not less
— Why vibe coding and agentic tools increase the temptation to skip discovery and rush straight into solution space
— Why product sense and product taste are the new differentiators — when anyone can build anything quickly, what you choose to build is what matters most
— Why investing in hands-on AI learning is no longer a nice-to-have for product managers

Referenced:
Claude Cowork: https://www.anthropic.com
Gemini Spark / Google I/O: https://io.google
Microsoft Copilot (M365): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/copilot
Lovable (AI prototyping): https://lovable.dev
Cursor (AI IDE): https://cursor.com
The Goal — Eliyahu M. Goldratt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
Andrew Ng on the shifting PM bottleneck
Mind the Product Chicago — 7 October 2026 (workshop 6 October): https://www.mindtheproduct.com