Briefing: Claude wants to use your computer
Briefing: Claude wants to use your computer
Plus: Spotify’s new artwork generator, How to use accelerators in product design, The new LinkedIn badge trend
Hi product people 👋, Rich Holmes here with the weekly briefing. I hope you’re well and a big welcome to the 380+ new readers who joined us this past week, too.
Coming up in this week’s briefing, we take a look at the new (reasonably terrifying) capabilities from Anthropic’s Claude, two new startups that use natural language to speed up product testing and SQL queries and some major new releases from Asana, Amazon and Spotify.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
PS, you can also: Watch the Briefing on YouTube | Follow on Substack Notes | Unlock the full newsletter
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - OAuth explained
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting and engineers are talking about OAuth, authorization, access tokens and refresh tokens and wondered to yourself what exactly they’re talking about, this Knowledge Series should help.
Deep - Gamification features explored
YouTube just announced a series of new flagship gamification features and Instacart did the same. And with this recent flurry of new gamified UX, it feels a little like we’re undergoing a gamification renaissance of sorts. In this Deep Dive we explore how top tier tech companies are introducing gamification into their products with some examples from 20+ companies including: YouTube, Instacart, Atlassian, Spotify, Grammarly and more.
Case study - How Gmail pioneered the idea of “conversational” email threads
A Gmail feature we use daily was once deemed impossible. But in 2005, a small team defied the “experts” and transformed email forever. What led to their breakthrough? This is the behinds the scenes story from inside Google.
Leadership thoughts - Anthropic’s CEO shares his view on the future of AI
Anthropic’s CEO has written a letter entitled Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better. It’s an intense, deep read as you might expect.
Here are some pretty bold predictions he makes:
AI could compress 50-100 years of biological and medical progress into 5-10 years, eliminating cancer and Alzheimer's
AI-driven economic growth in developing countries could potentially reach 20% annual GDP growth rates
Human lifespan could expand to around 150 years within a compressed timeframe
(Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic)
UX - How to use “accelerators” in product design to speed up user interaction times
Accelerators are transforming user interfaces by offering users faster, more efficient ways to perform tasks without complicating the experience. This article from NNGroup explores how tech companies integrate accelerators, like keyboard shortcuts and gestures, into their products. (NN Group)
Podcast - The Story of Apple Pay
10 years have passed since the launch of Apple Pay and it’s now used in over 78 different markets and tens of millions of stores worldwide. In this podcast, Apple’s VP of Pay and Wallet shares how Apple has transformed digital payments along with the challenges of driving adoption and the future of digital wallets.
New product features and innovation this week
Anthropic has released a series of new capabilities called Computer Use. Powered by an upgraded version of Claude, Computer Use can take over your computer to perform tasks based on the prompts you feed it. It sounds slightly terrifying but the productivity boosts could be huge - for use cases where it makes sense.
For example, it can take this prompt and create an entire website from it:
Please navigate to a new Chrome window, navigate to claude.ai, and once loaded, ask Claude to create a personal website with a 90s style theme.
Here’s what it created based on the prompt, complete with 90s-style scrolling marquees and Comic Sans fonts.
Anthropic says Computer Use will be able to automate repetitive tasks. The APIs they’ve built could also be very helpful for product teams who want to automate things like testing across browsers or checking that a specific user journey is working as intended.
Meanwhile…
Spotify has released a new feature which allows users to create their own album cover art. It’s available for both new and existing playlists and is a smart way to increase the network lock in effects of the app. If you’ve personalized your artwork for your favorite artists, why would you switch to a different streaming app if you can’t take it with you?
AI startup Ideogram has launched a major new feature called Canvas - an infinite creative board which allows users to generate, combine and edit AI imagery in one place.
Asana has released a new feature called AI Studio. It uses Asana’s Work Graph to allow users to create what it calls “Smart Workflows” to automate things like product launches and resource management. Asana says that during its internal testing they found that it was particularly valuable for user research teams who could use it for automating user interviews and sales teams who could use it for gathering prospect information, calculating pricing, and matching each lead with the correct partner—factoring in regional differences and partner discounts.
In other news…
Amazon is rolling out major new UI updates on its homepage. Some of the new components include a new “Window Display” along with product groupings and horizontal scrollable carousels. It also looks as though these components use a new font which Amazon is slowly rolling out across different products.
A new Y Combinator startup lets product teams run tests on mobile products using natural language. It’s called Mobile Boost and it speeds up the E2E testing process by allowing QA and other members of the product team to write tests once in plain English - and then run these tests across multiple different parts of the product stack. A neat idea that could drastically reduce the amount of time spent writing tests and boosting code coverage.
Watch the briefing
If you’d prefer an audiovisual version of the weekly briefing, our new NotebookLM-powered version is available on YouTube.
Tools you can use
MotherDuck is a data management tool that lets you include AI prompts into SQL queries.
Glazed is an analytics tool for designers with a difference: it lets designers get user insights directly from Figma designs so that you can see how every screen performs in the real world.
OpenPhone API lets you connect and sync call data across your CRM including call summaries and transcripts.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Perplexity has now reached ~15 million queries per day according to new analysis by the WSJ. Revenue has jumped from $10 million in March to $50 million today and Perplexity is valuing itself at over $8 billion.
Impressive, but it’s fair to say Google has quite the head start with over 8 billion daily searches.
More than 50% of new Netflix sign ups were for the ad-funded tier, up from 30% in the same quarter last year. The company boasted its biggest ever quarterly profit at $2.4 billion. Netflix also says engagement levels are currently around 2 hours of content watched per member per day. Earnings report letter.
Generative AI adoption surged 17% over the past year but there has been a drop in the deployment of AI projects and their return on investment. The percentage of AI projects reaching deployment has dropped by 8% points since 2021, while those showing meaningful ROI have decreased by 9.4%. Full report by Appen.
A new trend is taking over LinkedIn: users aren’t just #Opentowork any more - now they’re also using the #Desperate banner on their profiles. More than 200 million people have the #OpenToWork option turned on publicly or privately and the new #Desperate trend is for users who want to up the ante further.
The number of AI startups receiving seed funding is down 43% year on year.
AI-driven cyberattacks are on the rise with more than 500,000 taking place every day. The most common type is a “business logic” attack which involves using bots to target APIs. One for product teams to keep an eye on.
53% of an employee’s time is spent on “busy work,” with unproductive meetings doubling since 2019 according to a new report.
Other product news in brief
💲Stripe has acquired stablecoin business Bridge for $1 billion.
🫡Google is replacing the exec in charge of the company’s search engine and ads product.
🏞️Uber is reportedly exploring a purchase of Expedia to create the ultimate travel app.
💵OpenAI has hired its first Chief Economist.
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