Survive the AI Knife Fight: Building Products That Win — Brian Balfour, Reforge

If you’ve ever been blocked by vague specs, shifting goals, or chasing “vibes,” things have only gotten messier in the age of AI. Everyone is obsessing over engineers doing PM work and PMs cranking out prototypes—but that skips the hardest question: What should we build, and why will it win? Today’s competitive landscape is a knife-fight. When it’s trivial to ship “something,” true differentiation becomes brutally difficult. At Reforge, we built AI agents that analyze user feedback at scale, perform real-time market analysis, model feature impact, and run continuous user research -- pushing us to rethink what "product work” actually looks like. In this talk, we’ll explore: - How to find a seam within the red ocean of incumbents, well-funded upstarts, and the horde of startups. - How to use real-time feedback analysis, competitive monitoring, synthetic users, AI-native research to understand impact before it ships. - How to architect workflows where human intuition and machine intelligence ship product side by side. About Brian Balfour Brian Balfour, Founder/CEO of Reforge, previously VP Growth @ HubSpot. Prior to Reforge, he has started multiple VC backed companies, and grown user bases to millions of daily active users. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter