The Emotional Whiplash of the AI Wave: Between Enthusiasm, FOMO, and Fear – with Sebastian Borggrewe (Co-Founder @ Product Masterclass, ex ProSiebenSat.1)

In the twenty-second episode of the PRODUKTKRAFT Podcast, I’m doing something different than usual. Normally, we talk about objective facts here: frameworks, processes, strategies. But the last year or two haven’t just been demanding in terms of craft; they’ve also been emotionally challenging, frightening – and at the same time incredibly inspiring. That emotional whiplash is exactly what I talk about with Sebastian Borggrewe, co-founder of Product Masterclass. Sebastian is a trained software engineer who moved into product via the German media group ProSiebenSat.1 and the car-sharing services DriveNow and SHARE NOW, and today he teaches product teams how to bring AI natively into their workflows. So he knows the craft from all three directions: he practices it, he teaches it, and as a practitioner he’s caught in the same storm as the rest of us.

We go through the episode emotion by emotion, starting with the one you hear loudest in public: enthusiasm. Why does building with AI feel to Sebastian like the early years of his career? What changed in the past year to turn a separate chat window into an integrated system? And why are non-techies, of all people, learning the basic concepts of Git right now, after not caring about them for five years?

From there, we move to the more uncomfortable feelings. What does FOMO do to product people who see in their LinkedIn feed every day what supposedly everyone else can already do? Why does Sebastian consider curiosity the better driver – and fear and envy the worst advisors you can have when making a decision? We talk about the ignorance of those who dismiss everything as hype, about the rarity your own craft is losing right now, and about the ego that gets in the way.

On the topic of fear, it gets concrete. Why is fear a passive feeling – and why would anger sometimes be the more productive one? What can companies do to get people out of this passivity, and what damage do they do when they work with fear themselves instead? Sebastian tells the story of a company that announced to its workforce that in a few years it would have only a fifth of its people. And we end up at the question of why people in tech in particular tend to rewrite their own feelings as factual arguments.

Finally, things get down to earth again: how dependent are we on a handful of frontier model providers? Will these models become a commodity, and will they simply run locally on our computers in ten years? And why doesn’t Sebastian believe that large language models will lead to AGI?

Have a listen to the twenty-second episode of the PRODUKTKRAFT Podcast to find out what the AI wave does to us emotionally – and how to turn a passive feeling into an active one!