In a recent corporate restructuring hailed by developers as “long overdue,” local software engineer Alex Chen expressed minimal distress upon discovering that his product manager (PM) had been replaced by an advanced Large Language Model (LLM), citing the AI’s superior accuracy and reduced tendency toward elaborate hallucinations.

“Honestly, it was refreshing,” Chen remarked. “The AI actually knows what ‘API’ stands for and doesn’t confidently insist on entirely fictional timelines.”

Chen described his previous PM as a skilled “token-prediction machine,” frequently assembling strings of buzzwords—”leverage,” “scalable,” and “user-centric”—in ways that sounded impressive yet rarely aligned with project realities. “We used to joke that our PM operated like a poorly trained GPT model,” Chen noted, “confidently generating random but plausible-sounding strategies whenever cornered.”

Researchers at the Institute for Obvious Workplace Analogies confirmed these observations in their recent study, highlighting that many human PMs regularly engage in behavior reminiscent of AI hallucinations—producing confidently inaccurate statements and seamlessly pivoting to alternative hallucinations when corrected.

“When we introduced a correction, the human PM would just pivot to another equally baseless scenario,” researcher Dr. Eleanor Barrett explained. “However, the new AI PM, surprisingly, not only acknowledged the correction but even explained clearly why the initial assertion was incorrect. It was uncanny.”

Developers reported further satisfaction with the AI’s straightforward answers to technical questions. “The new AI PM explains APIs without hesitation,” Chen observed. “My old PM would confidently guess ‘Application Protocol Interface’ or something equally incorrect and then double down when challenged.”

Despite these clear improvements, upper management remains hesitant to replace human PMs entirely, fearing the loss of “strategic vision and innovation”—terms developers suspect may themselves be hallucinated.

“Management keeps telling us the human PM provided unique insight,” Chen concluded, “but to be honest, the only unique thing they provided was a vivid imagination.”