Originally written for my IIM Calcutta alumni magazine. Sharing it here too.
I left IIM Calcutta as a product manager. Three years in, the role I trained for is being rewritten. I stopped waiting for the job description to catch up and started building with AI.
My day job is payments and ecommerce, the infrastructure behind 20,000+ stores across India. This year I shipped conversational checkout: an AI agent that runs the payment across multiple steps instead of just suggesting one. The first live transaction closed on a real UPI QR. The whole flow ran on an AI-native surface: the purchase completed inside ChatGPT. That reset what I think is possible to build.
The bigger shift happened after hours. I stopped only using AI and started building my own — agents that read my inbox, answer on my behalf, run on infrastructure I control. I open-source them on GitHub and share the process on LinkedIn, so anyone can take the code and build on it. Friends, batchmates, seniors, and juniors keep reaching out to compare notes on their own AI experiments. A small community is forming around it.
I also teach college students how to learn with AI and build with it, not just consume it. One of those sessions is up on YouTube:
The MBA got me in the room. It doesn't keep me there. Proof of work does — shipping in the open, where anyone can check what you've actually built.
So if you're wondering whether AI threatens your role: start building. That's the whole answer.
"Start building" raises the obvious follow-up. So is the PM role finished? I made that case separately. The title collapses where the builder is also the user. The function never does. Someone still has to hold the user in the room. Impact is the hierarchy, not the title.
Further reading → PMs might be disappearing — but only where the builder is also the user