Research
April 15, 2026
Products That Count, Editor
Administrator
The Product Awards celebrate the best in product management. Specifically, these Product Awards honor the best tools by and for product managers. Special thanks to the sponsor of the “2026 Q1 Product Guide,” Mighty Capital.
After nine years of running the Product Awards, one shift is unmistakable: AI is no longer a feature. It’s becoming the foundation.
As boardrooms moved from asking whether AI delivered results to demanding proof that it did, judges stopped rewarding flashy tools and started asking where AI was truly embedded. With 10,000+ nominations, 300 finalists, and 72 winners selected by a panel of senior product leaders, this quarter’s awards reflect a market in transitio, one where AI deployment into production increased 11x year-over-year, and superficial “AI wrappers” no longer make the cut.
This guide captures what separates infrastructure-level AI from products that simply layer on copilots or chatbots.
Across this quarter’s highest-scoring entries, three traits stood out. Winning products embed AI directly into operational workflows and decision-making environments, rely on hard-to-replicate data advantages that create real switching costs, and deliver measurable ROI: cost savings, efficiency gains, and outcomes that show up in a boardroom slide.
The result is a quieter kind of progress: agentic systems that interpret domain-specific data, automate complex workflows, and act as operational decision layers, all while giving Product Managers back time for meaningful work. With the enterprise data market projected to grow from $111 billion in 2025 to $243 billion by 2032, and enterprise spending on agentic AI expected to exceed $50 billion by 2028, the infrastructure advantage is only compounding.
Download the 2026 Q1 Product Guide to understand how product leaders are building durable moats in the age of embedded, outcome-driven AI.
Produced by Products That Count in collaboration with Mighty Capital.
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Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of >30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success.
AdministratorWhat are the best AI & Data products for product managers in 2025? Find out by reading about the winning products in the 2025 Product Guide.