Those are a few examples of challenges a product manager might face when working with artificial intelligence. As someone who has practiced the craft for decades (I founded a company that built an AI-related, algorithmic product and now run product management for applied AI for Xerox at PARC), I want to share some thoughts on what is distinctive about product management for AI. Product managing AI-based applications is still product management, but it requires some additional know-how, and maybe even some magic dust. While the role of product manager has been around since the '30s, the specifics of the job function (the "mini-CEO") have generally been vague. Nevertheless, the popularity of careers in product management have soared in recent years.

Andrew Moore is the new head of Google's Cloud AI business, a unit that is striving to make machine-learning tools and techniques more accessible and useful for ordinary businesses. To that end, his team announced several new tools today. These include AI Hub, a modular framework for connecting different machine-learning components, and Kubeflow Pipelines, software that makes machine-learning projects more portable. Efforts to make AI more accessible are likely to define the technology's impact. They will also prove very important to the future of companies like Google.