I have been in Product Management across multiple Fortune 500s. Being a Product Lead means juggling strategy, execution, and collaboration—all while staying ahead of immediate operations pain points, business needs and targets and competitive market trends. ALL AT ONCE! You are always context switching.

The good news? AI can supercharge your workflow, automate tedious tasks, and help you make smarter decisions. Automation can help you create systems so that you can save time on the repetitive work and focus on the work that sparks joy – the real product management. Or, even save a few hours for more quality family time.

Here are the top free AI tools that will help you work smarter, not harder. Use this as only a support tool. The output may not be the perfect answer you are looking for, but it increases your productivity as it gives you the basic drafts and you never start on a task from scratch. Treat AI as your personal assistant :).

1. ChatGPT

This is my GO TO for all drafts. 🙂

💡 How It Helps:
ChatGPT is your go-to AI assistant for brainstorming, planning, and documentation. Whether you need to refine ideas, generate release notes, or draft customer communications, this tool has you covered.

🚀 Productivity Hacks:

• Brainstorm Features: 
  • Ask ChatGPT to list innovative feature ideas based on market trends
  • Give possible solutions based on the pain-points relevant to your business.
• Draft Faster: 
  • Quickly generate release notes, internal memos, or investor updates.
  • Generate skeletal user story, acceptance criteria, Product Requirement Document(PRD)
    • Prompt example : “As a product manager, Give me a user story and acceptance criteria for storage optimization in a warehouse management system, taking into consideration item attributes.Give me constraints and business rules as well. “. Check out this post on how to write a perfect prompt!
    • If your organization uses a specific template, share that as well, to avoid rework 🙂
• Automate Planning: 
  • Outline go-to-market strategies
  • Draft launch checklists effortlessly
  • Draft test cases based on your functional requirements – ChatGPT will truly surprise you 🙂
• Automate your Excels:
  • To be honest, even today, many companies rely on Excel or a similar tool to maintain and compute data. Check for formulas to automate your excels.
  • Generate relevant table templates and paste them in excel to continue editing
  • Use AI to automate all manual calculations

2. Perplexity.ai

This is my GO TO for all Research on a specific topic. 🙂

💡 How It Helps:
Market research is crucial, and Perplexity.ai simplifies fact-checking and data analysis by pulling insights from multiple AI models. You can’t trust most AI results just yet, because of something call “hallucinations”.(Hallucinations are when AI models generate false or misleading information)

🚀 Productivity Hacks:

• Quick Competitive Analysis: Gone are the days when you have to look through 10 Google search provided to understand something. Get summarized insights on competitor products in minutes.
• Fact-Check Instantly: Avoid misinformation and validate market trends before making decisions.
• Understand Complex Topics: Break down technical or market-related concepts into digestible summaries.
• Instant how-to’s : Get how to’s in step by step instructions

3. Google Gemini (Formerly Bard)

💡 How It Helps:
Google Gemini offers real-time industry insights, content generation, and multilingual support—perfect for data-driven decision-making. Have you tried the conversational AI agent just yet?

🚀 Productivity Hacks:

• Validate Product Ideas: 
  • Get AI-backed insights on whether your feature aligns with industry trends.
  • Try conversational AI to explore more ideas

Other Apps

💡 Not completely free though, but Notion AI turns documentation chaos into organized knowledge, helping with brainstorming, note-taking, and summarization. I tried the flow chart generation from the App & it’s remarkable. The platform only offers 3 free chats with the Notion AI.

💡 Check out this post to automate work flows via Zapier.

Maximize Your Productivity with AI

These tools can’t replace your job and are only as good as you use them. Key is to create systems for repetitive tasks. Let AI handle repetitive work so you can focus on innovation. Here’s how to truly 10x your productivity:

✅ Automate Routine Tasks
✅ Make Data-Driven Decisions
✅ Accelerate Learning
✅ Draft templates & documentation

By integrating these free AI tools into your workflow, you’ll streamline work and save your time.

Have you tried any of these tools? Let us know what you use them for in the comments below.