I'm an Uber product manager who uses AI to automate some of my work. It frees up more time for the human side of the job.

• Nimisha Sharath is a product manager at Uber and said she uses AI to automate around 30% of her job.
• She estimates AI saves her 100 minutes of notes a day and allows her to read research in minutes — not hours.
• AI allows her to focus more on human aspects like relationship building and stakeholder management.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nimisha Sharath, a Seattle-based Uber product manager. Her identity and employment were verified by Business Insider. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been leading the immigrant life for 8 years now.

I was on a student visa when I moved to the US to pursue my Master's degree, and moved to a work visa when I became a data scientist for Microsoft. I was a data scientist for the first couple of years and then I transitioned to be a product manager.

I moved from Microsoft to Instacart because I wanted to try out a startup. Making that kind of a move from a company as secure as Microsoft is not something that a lot of people in my position do. It worked out for a while, but there were layoffs at the company and I lost my job.

I had about 90 days to find a job or leave the country.

It was very harsh and the job market was bad at the time. So it took a lot of grit and hard work, but I ended up accepting an offer as a product manager at Uber and I work in road safety.

A lot has happened in the AI world since I left Instacart. We have so many versions of chatbots including Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. I didn't have this kind of AI automation in my last role.

Knowledge about what AI is and how it can be misused does not feel like a choice at the moment. As a product manager, it's important to learn about it — and as an immigrant, I feel it's a necessity. I really need to know how it's going to be affecting my livelihood and I think it's key to staying in this country.

When looking for job, it's important that a huge part of your role isn't likely to be automated in the future. It should need a lot of human involvement.

Around 30% of my job involves automation

I'd say maybe 30% of my role has gotten automated by AI — and out of choice.

As a product manager, I'm in a lot of meetings. AI takes my meeting notes and summarizes them so that I'm able to figure out who said what and who is leaning toward what decision. I don't need to take specific notes and send them out to people so that they're on track. AI does it for me.

It saves 15 or 20 minutes after every meeting when I would typically put stuff together and mail it to people and make sure everyone's on the same page. On average, I attend about four or five meetings per day, so that's 100 minutes a day saved.

If it weren't for AI, I would still be in the office putting things together, and sending out notes after everyone leaves.

I'm also able to upskill myself at a very fast pace. I can read research papers in a matter of minutes as opposed to a few hours. I'm able to understand what research or literature is out there about a specific solution area that I want to explore and do a complete SWOT analysis to figure out whether we should build something or not.

I'm able to prepare strategy decks with much more information and conviction as opposed to a few years earlier, when we all had to spend a lot of time doing a ton of research.

I have more time for the human side of the job

AI gives me time to do the more human side of things, like relationship building and stakeholder management — and I think that's a part of the job that can never really get automated.

As a product manager, you're the glue that holds seven or eight different kinds of teams together. Why would an operations team ever work with a data science or a design team? They wouldn't really. But as a product manager, we have the capacity to bring all of these people together and create magic.

Now, I'm actually getting time to talk to people and do that.

Judgment is also something that I think can never be eliminated by AI. Even if an AI tool is trained on the entire world's data, that data available is still biased. It's never going to be 100% representative of everybody's thoughts and opinions.

So, at the end of the day, you do need some sort of human intervention to make sure the decisions you're making are globally relevant.

I think parts of every role will get automated by AI. It's inevitable. Instead of waiting for AI to come and encroach on your job, become the person who uses AI to do your job better. Sure, 30% of your job may get eliminated. That's fine.

Become the person who teaches other people how to use it. That's a whole new skill in itself.

Has AI changed the way you work? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work email and device at aaltchek@businessinsider.com