Being AI savvy is no longer optional, it's mandatory

Commenting on a post by Iago Maciel about becoming technical as a founder and AI-savviness as the new baseline for everyone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about which tasks will be left for us product people. As I replied to Iago, I agree. Being AI savvy is no longer an option. It’s mandatory. Just as in the past it was Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and later in the product world it became knowing how to write a SQL query, now it’s knowing the AI tools.

However, the roles change quite a bit depending on the context. I went back to small/scaling companies, and there most people are expected to be “builders”. Yes, most of them are building something. Process? Automation. Product? Vibe coding/building agents.

As I’ve said before about the four archetypes (Slop Cannons, SREs, Hot People, and Adults), corporations will still need a lot of AI Facilitators/Accelerators — which would be the “hot people” and the “adults”. These people who know how to persuade and lead are still HUGELY important. It’s part of the structure of a large company.

Tech/data people are increasingly becoming platform teams — the “SRE” archetype. They’re the ones who build efficient, scalable services and the guardrails so the builder crowd screws up LESS.

My little crowd from product/design/ops — in my opinion — needs to be focused on “buildar” — I find that word bizarre, but “construir” (Portuguese for “to build”) doesn’t capture the essence. Unfortunately, for that we need to be a bit more technical. Nothing AI can’t help you with. :)

So, if you ask me how to move forward in your career, I sound like a broken record repeating myself… go use AI, go build with AI and invest in AI. Do you need to buy lots of tools? Not at all, but master the foundation models and the rest gets easy.

Iago’s post - https://lnkd.in/dfKehtSf

Originally written in Portuguese and published on LinkedIn on June 19, 2026. I translated it into English with the help of AI (Claude): it let me bring my LinkedIn posts to people who don’t read Portuguese without rewriting each one from scratch. I reviewed the translation to keep my original meaning and tone.