Catch up with everything you need to know in product, AI and more this week: www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Tb...

Spotify’s new AI feature, Perplexity’s new browser launch date and Microsoft’s big announcement

YouTube video by Department of Product

youtube.com

Google unveiled its new Material Design Expressive system this week. The new version of Material Design uses bold, expressive colors including pinks, purples and oranges, new physics for UI interactions and an expansive new library of shapes.

Multi-agent architectures involve multiple AI agents working collaboratively, each specializing in specific tasks, to solve complex problems more efficiently than a single AI agent. Here’s a snapshot of how companies are using them in the real world:

This is the new big tech flex...

If you buy into the hype, the way users make payments could be about to change forever. This week, Mastercard revealed its new AI agent payment feature called Agent Pay, Visa announced a full AI agent payment framework and PayPal unveiled an entire new product stack for agentic payments

Contractors are losing their jobs to Al at DuoLingo. It's not difficult to see why. Here's a comparison of the time it took to complete 100 vs 150 courses with and without AI:

This week, I explore the latest predictions from Meta’s CTO about the impact of AI, a new tool that will transform how you do presentations and a huge study from KPMG which reveals how we’re really using AI at work - with some surprising results. departmentofproduct.substack.com/p/briefing-d...

Briefing: DuoLingo goes AI-first and Meta’s CTO predicts the end of Apps

Plus, how to turn your users into a community, Lyft’s new AI Assistant, new MCP servers

departmentofproduct.substack.com

I hope this means we’ll finally be able to delete the circle that haunts me across every Meta app.

In this week’s YouTube version of the weekly briefing, I take a look at Perplexity’s new Voice Assistant on iOS. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hAK...

Perplexity vs Siri, Grok gets eyes and Google declares the start of the Era of AI Experience.

YouTube video by Department of Product

youtube.com

Google’s experiments with new Search UX seems to be paying off. According to their latest earnings report: - Circle to Search usage is up 40% in the current quarter - AI Mode queries are twice as long as traditional Search queries - Visual searches with Lens is up five billion since October

With many vibe coders finding out the hard way about the importance of security, Lovable has announced a new “Security Scan” feature that highlights an potential vulnerabilities in your app before its shipped. Let’s see if this puts a stop to some of the horror stories we’ve read about lately…

A new research paper from Google suggests that the “Era of Experience” is upon us. The researchers suggest that AI has evolved from the simulation era where it played games like chess and the era of human data where it consumed human data for training purposes to now enter the era of experience.

Healthy living, personalised kids stories, image generation and explaining “legalese” are some of the fastest growing generative AI use cases. It’s becoming strangely essential for tech companies to keep on top of this to understand how AI is cannibalising their value proposition.

In this week's YouTube version of the weekly Briefing, I explore the rumors around ChatGPT's social network and new data that shows how we really use AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YReF...

A ChatGPT Social Network? Claude gets a new research tool, Netflix's new AI superpower and more...

YouTube video by Department of Product

youtube.com

Using AI at work is now mandatory in some companies. In this week’s Knowledge Series, I explore a new set of mini apps you can build to use at work including:

I've been playing around with Notion's new Mail product for the past few weeks. It's super clean and easy to use but the biggest drawback for me is that it looks and functions far too much like Notion's core product that it's actually a little bit confusing.

Google is winning right now. One of their new announcements at Cloud was their “Idea Generation Agent”. Here’s how it works:

YouTube is considering adding a new feature that will limit the amount of doomscrolling users can do on Shorts every day. Why not just not build these brain-rotting features in the first place?

Shopify's CEO demands product teams use AI - but is it making us lazy? departmentofproduct.substack.com/p/shopifys-c...

Shopify's CEO demands product teams use AI - but is it making us lazy?

Plus: How to differentiate AI products, the evolution of unit economics, Stanford University AI Report

departmentofproduct.substack.com

Ouch

I love this new application of AI from the Kindle product team. So often I roll my eyes when I see a new “AI-powered” feature that adds little to the UX that’s clearly designed to be a box checking exercise but I can imagine this being super useful.

YouTube could now be worth up to $550 billion - representing 30% of the company’s parent company, Alphabet. Its revenue may soon surpass Disney.

Google’s NotebookLM is continuing to ship new features. This week, it rolled out a new Mind Maps feature that’s perfect for scenarios where you want to visualise your thinking or technical concepts / processes you want to understand in more detail.

If you need a quick update on all the important AI, tech and product news this week, here's my latest product briefing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk4t...

Amazon's new Nova Act AI model, Snap's UX Problem, Deel vs Rippling "spy" speaks out and more...

YouTube video by Department of Product

youtube.com

Integrating an AI Assistant into your product doesn’t necessarily mean just slapping an AI chatbot onto it. In this example, I clone Shopify’s product editor to show how you can use “vibe coding” to build an AI Assistant that works as a contextual helper.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that it is now supporting the new protocol that everyone’s talking about: MCP. In this week’s Knowledge Series, I explore the essentials worth knowing from a non-engineer’s perspective. departmentofproduct.substack.com/p/mcp-explai...

MCP Explained: A simple guide for product teams

🧠 Knowledge Series 66: Everything you need to know about this new protocol that everyone’s talking about

departmentofproduct.substack.com

This is an interesting take on AI and the future of software engineering. Graphite is an AI code starting that positions itself as a tool to review but not write code.

Notifications aren’t just for mobile apps any more. Over 90% of the companies featured in the latest DoP Deep Dive now also use browser notifications.

According to new research cited in the WSJ, just 6% of execs say their company is using AI agents. For all the hype, the reality is a little disappointing so far. But some companies have managed to ship AI agent capabilities. Here’s a snapshot of some featured in the WSJ:

Using ChatGPT too much can create an unhealthy emotional dependency. A study commissioned by OpenAI and MIT shows that “power users” are most at risk of emotional dependency - particularly when they use voice mode.