As I continue my research into AI tools for product management, one tool that really stands out for its simplicity is ChatGPT’s agent mode. There are a couple of different tools that work in a similar way, but the current ChatGPT agent mode is probably the simplest of them all and is very useful for product managers.
After you log in to ChatGPT, before you issue a prompt, you can hit the little plus sign and select Agent mode (assuming you have the correct type of account). In this case, I asked it to do some sentiment analysis on Reddit for me:
And the result:
Which, honestly, is pretty good. I wouldn’t say it’s world class, but it’s similar to what I would expect a junior PM to be able to do. It also saved me hours of combing through dozens of posts and allowed me to check source data quickly.
This is a general theme with the current crop of AI tooling: They’re really good at summarization.
It’s important to note here that you’re essentially asking ChatGPT to scrape the website. That means that if you have to log in to the site or scrape confidential customer data, you’re essentially handing your login and customer data to OpenAI. Your call if you want to do that.
For me, I find that using agent mode allows me to use AI very quickly to use systems that I don’t know anything about and don’t want to know about. Yes, you could use the site’s API and write a script to do this or you could use MCP to do this, but with agent mode, you just ask ChatGPT and it does the work. Zero effort on your part. Very handy for doing research against public websites specifically. If you wanted to run a specific automation every day and make it an essential part of your work, you may want to spend some effort to clean it up and make it more reliable but this technique gets you data quickly for pretty much any site on the internet.
Here are some use cases that I’ve used this for:
Sentiment analysis. This is what I did in the example I just described. Use ChatGPT to read social media and look for trends.
Instructions and documentation. There are several products I use that have very dense manuals. Those manuals are online. You can ask ChatGPT to read the manual and then you can ask it questions. “How do I turn off this notification?” is now summarized for me and I don’t have to wade through three hundred pages of text.
UX analysis. This one isn’t super obvious, but if you ask agent to use a product website, you can then ask it to critique that site. Since it has access to the running UI, it knows how the product actually works. So, you can use a prompt like, “As a professional UX designer, what are your top ten suggestions about how to improve the UX for http://my.site.com?”
Competitive analysis. You can also point it at your competitors. “Use http://my.competitor.com and tell me how it’s better than http://my.site.com” or even “Log in to http://my.competitor.com and tell me about the new features. Summarize how those new features work.” Etc.
Of course, if you just want extended search, like “Tell me who the most prolific and respected voices about product management are and summarize their top advice for product managers” you can use something like Perplexity:
I tend to use Perplexity when I need deeper search and summarization from the web but I don’t have a specific site in mind.
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