New research from airfocus by Lucid reveals a growing “AI maturity gap” among product organizations as artificial intelligence rapidly changes how software is built. While AI has dramatically accelerated coding and software execution, many teams still struggle to operationalize AI effectively when making strategic product decisions.
According to the research, only 4% of product teams report not using AI today, signaling near-universal adoption across the industry. However, widespread usage has not translated into widespread confidence. Nearly half of product teams (48%) say they still struggle to separate signal from noise, even as AI becomes increasingly embedded across analytics, research, and feedback workflows.
The findings point to a larger shift taking place across software development. As AI accelerates coding and execution, the primary bottleneck is moving upstream toward prioritization, alignment, and strategic judgment. Bain’s 2025 research found that writing and testing code now accounts for only 25–35% of the idea-to-launch journey, leaving the remaining 65–75% centered on discovery, alignment, prioritization, and decision-making.
“The story isn’t that product teams are slow to adopt AI. They’ve already adopted it. The story is that 48% of them can’t trust what comes out the other side, because the AI is working from fragmented context. The next round of competitive advantage won’t go to the teams with the most AI tools. It goes to the teams whose AI is grounded in one connected source of product truth,” said Malte Scholz, co-founder of airfocus.
Barriers to scaling AI remain rooted in trust and data quality. Forty percent of product leaders cite lack of trust in AI outputs as a top blocker, followed by concerns around security (39%) and data quality (32%). The findings reinforce the need for AI systems grounded in structured, connected product data rather than fragmented workflows and disconnected sources of information.
As organizations continue integrating AI into product development, the research suggests the next competitive advantage will come not from adopting AI faster, but from helping teams make more aligned, confident decisions with it.
airfocus helps product organizations solve this challenge by connecting customer feedback, strategic priorities, roadmaps, and business objectives into a unified system for decision-making. By grounding AI in structured product context, teams can reduce noise, improve alignment, and make faster, more confident decisions about what to build and why it matters.
