THE IMPACT OF AUTONOMOUS AI AGENTS ON PRODUCT DISCOVERY EFFICIENCY IN DIGITAL PRODUCT TEAMS

Fahad Abdullah

doi:10.71146/kjmr1010

Authors

Fahad Abdullah Department of Business and Management Sciences, Master’s in Project Management, The Superior College Lahore, Lahore, Pakistan. Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.71146/kjmr1010

Keywords:

Autonomous AI agents, product discovery efficiency, digital product teams, team-AI collaboration, data quality, organisational AI readiness, reproducibility, model validation

Abstract

This paper develops and reproducibly demonstrates a structural model that examines how the use of autonomous AI agents may influence product discovery efficiency in digital product teams. The model considers direct relationships with product discovery efficiency, discovery speed, and customer-insight quality; the mediating role of team-AI collaboration; the moderating roles of data quality, task complexity, organisational AI readiness, and product-team maturity; and the negative association of perceived AI risk with agent use. A positivist, deductive, quantitative, constructed-data model-validation design was implemented through a fully documented Python pipeline with a fixed random seed of 42. An initial pool of 400 professional profiles was generated; after a programmed eligibility stage and transparent screening for incomplete and uniform-response patterns, 326 cases were retained. Reflective construct scores were analysed using loading-weighted composites, standardized path models, and 5,000 nonparametric bootstrap resamples. Autonomous AI-agent use was positively associated with product discovery efficiency (beta = 0.173), discovery speed (beta = 0.331), customer-insight quality (beta = 0.346), and team-AI collaboration (beta = 0.510). Team-AI collaboration partially mediated the relationship between AAU and PDE (indirect beta = 0.180; VAF = 42.8%). Data quality, task complexity, and organisational AI readiness significantly moderated the AAU-PDE relationship in the hypothesised directions, whereas product-team maturity did not (beta = 0.080; 95% CI [-0.034, 0.204]). Perceived AI risk was negatively associated with AI-agent use (beta = -0.354). These results demonstrate the internal, reproducible behaviour of a researcher-specified simulation model and are not empirical estimates of real organisations.

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