Anthropic and OpenAI’s new bets on the AI Super Assistant
Plus: The $130 million AI coding startup that could eliminate tech debt and the end of the front end engineer?
Hi product people 👋,
Coming up this week, Anthropic and OpenAI double down on new super assistant features that could put the SaaS model as we know it at risk.
Plus, Perplexity’s CEO shares how his teams build products and a new AI coding agent from a company that’s raised over $130 million so far. It comes with a powerful new feature called “Team Memories” that allows agents to not only craft code but also build a memory of why certain engineering decisions were made in the first place. A tech debt destroyer’s dream…
Happy Friday and have a great weekend!
Rich at DoP
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Anthropic and OpenAI bet big on super assistants
First up, Anthropic’s Claude has released a new feature called “Connectors”. These are essentially a new way for you to connect with third party apps through MCP - but without all the hassle that was traditionally associated with MCP servers.
A few weeks back they announced “Extensions” which were pretty much the same thing but for locally run MCP servers but Connectors let you connect with remote MCP servers, too. The initial line up includes MCP servers from Stripe, Linear, Figma, Google Calendar and others which are super relevant for product teams. This means you do things like get status updates from user stories, sales information or upcoming meetings without ever having to leave the Claude UI. Slowly but surely, the disintermediation of products is happening, but MCP adoption is far from widespread for now.
OpenAI’s new feature could accelerate this trend further. It is reported to be testing a new “Checkouts” feature that lets users make payments through ChatGPT without ever leaving the app. According to The Information, the checkout feature involves early partnerships with ecommerce platforms like Shopify.
The company also unveiled a new feature called “ChatGPT agent” that can choose from a toolbox of agentic skills and complete tasks for you on using its own computer. This includes tasks like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news”. It can also create spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations based on its output. Clearly, this is a direct attack on Microsoft and Workspace but so far, the presentations it creates don’t appear to be anywhere near as compelling as something you might craft by hand. Emphasis on the so far with that one, though… If you watch the promo video you’ll catch a glimpse of those here around the 01:47 mark.
Meanwhile…
Google has launched a selection of “featured Notebooks” in NotebookLM - essentially a curated collection of publicly available notebooks that users can use as a foundation for creating their own. The initial lineup includes the entire works of Shakespeare, longevity advice from Eric Topol and a Notebook tracking the earnings reports from top companies.
The company has also rolled out a new feature that lets AI call businesses on your behalf. This was first announced back in January but is finally seeing the light of day.
In other news…
Amazon has launched Kiro - its own competitor to the likes of Windsurf and Codex for engineering teams. Kiro combines AI agents with project specifications, technical architecture and automated task management to support a complete software development lifecycle inside a single interface.
At their AWS Summit in New York, the company announced Bedrock AgentCore - a new set of services that help product / engineering teams build AI agents. It includes:
Memory Management - makes it easy to build context-aware agents by providing both short-term and long-term memory that persists across user sessions.
Code Interpreter - AgentCore Code Interpreter allows agents to write and execute code securely in their own sandboxed environments.
Browser Tool - provides a secure, scalable, cloud-based browser so agents can interact with websites at scale.
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack
Knowledge Series - AI playground: 10 new ways to get hands on experience at work
It’s been 6 months since the last AI playground back in February. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. In this playground, we’ll explore how to use new products and features like Perplexity’s AI browser Comet, Genspark’s generative AI spreadsheet builder and Google’s impressive video generation model Veo 3. Every use case is designed with product / tech teams in mind to make them as relevant as possible for use at work. This includes things like automatically creating lists of LinkedIn profiles of new candidates to hire that meet highly specific criteria, building customer testimonial videos, mini apps for OKRs and more. (Department of Product)
Summer reading list - MIT’s Summer Book Collection
The MIT reading list is always a treat. It’s a hand curated collection of reading lists to stimulate your mind over the summer months. This year’s topics span AI, strategy and competitive advantages, societal transformations and human skillsets in the AI age. (MIT)
How to design scrolling behavior (NN Group)
Reflections on OpenAI (written by a former OpenAI employee)
How Replit went from $10 million to $100 million in just 9 months (Y Combinator)
How to boil your strategy down into one clear visualization (Harvard Business Review)
Perplexity’s CEO on how to build successful products
This week, their CEO also teased a mobile version of their browser, Comet, saying development is moving at a fast pace - even for Perplexity’s standards.
Tools you can use
Asimov from Reflection - an AI agent that understands your codebase. Asimov ingests entire codebases, architecture documents, GitHub threads, chat history, and more, to build a memory of your engineering team’s technical decisions and avoid tech debt. Raised over $130 million so far.
Clueso - create product demo videos in minutes. Smart auto-zooms, AI voices, convert slides into videos.
Basic Memory - transform your AI conversations into structured, interconnected knowledge.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Microsoft Copilot appears to be winning the AI enterprise wars. 82% of enterprise respondents in a survey conducted by investment banking group Jeffries say they have adopted Microsoft Copilot vs 71% for ChatGPT. 97% of respondents of a separate survey conducted by Morgan Stanley say they expect to use some form of AI tools from Microsoft over the next year.
But, Microsoft’s consumer mobile app downloads for Copilot are lagging behind ChatGPT with 79 million downloads vs 900 million for ChatGPT.
Weekly mobile app subscriptions now contribute 46% to iOS app revenue, up 9.5% this year; while one-time purchases grew by 6.3% in Q1. U.S. installs generate 3–4 times more revenue than other regions. Retention continues to be a major problem for mobile apps, though with only single-digit percentages of users remaining after a year. State of in-app Subscriptions Report 2025.
Gen Z users aren’t too sure about AI features in dating. Almost 60% of Gen Z respondents expressed unease about using AI for dating-related content.
The latest Consumer Trends report is here. It’s a biannual report from The New Consumer and here’s some data that might be of interest:
US consumer spending on ChatGPT has more than doubled year-over-year (+168%).
OpenAI’s 1 year consumer retention looks like a mid-grade streaming service, hovering just over 50%
64% of Gen Z and 62% of Millennials have used AI tools for work in the past year, up significantly from 2024.
Top work tasks for AI include research (48%), writing emails/memos (39%), learning new skills (36%), note-taking/summarizing meetings (35%).
68% of enterprise companies (with 1,000+ employees) have already adopted agentic AI and 33% of all companies surveyed in a new survey say they’ve adopted them. Nearly half (46%) are equally prioritizing efficiency gains and revenue growth and New Relic says it is seeing 30% quarter-over-quarter growth in monitoring AI applications by its customers. AI Quarterly Pulse Survey 2025.
Finally…
Is front end engineering over? Gumroad’s CEO says the era of earning $200-$400k as a front end engineer has officially ended, suggesting that front end specialists should retrain into other roles.
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