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
Hi everyone, Rich here with your weekly product briefing.
Coming up this week, we 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.
Plus, DuoLingo’s CEO jumps on the AI-first bandwagon with a memo published on LinkedIn that unveils how the company plans to implement its own AI policies (it’s not good news for contractors). And the latest release from Mastercard that takes the application of AI agents to the next level.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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Reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - What is an AI Agent SDK?
AI Agent SDKs are pretty hot right now. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen the release of a bunch of new AI agent SDKs from the likes of Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others as agentic experiences start to take shape and product teams start dipping their toes into building their own AI Agents. But what exactly are these AI Agent SDKs and how can product teams use them in their development processes?
Deep - How are companies pricing AI features?
In this deep dive, we’re going to go deep into how companies are pricing their AI features in 2025. Over 25+ real world examples from companies including Adobe, WhatsApp, Twilio, X, Replit, Miro and others. (Department of Product)
UX - How to design prompt suggestions in AI chatbots
Prompt suggestions are a common design element in AI-chat features, but users often ignore them, especially when they’re not in the right place or don’t feel useful/ NNGroup’s Kate Moran and Tim Neusesser explain some key considerations when designing prompt suggestions. (NN Group)
Strategy - How to turn your customer base into a community
“Community” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But what does it really mean to build one—and what does it take to make it last? Matt Mullenweg, the cofounder of WordPress and the founder and CEO of Automattic, tackles these questions. (Harvard Business Review)
Skills - How to manage tech debt in the AI era
AI is transforming business — and increasing technical debt in enterprise systems. Consider these four key insights for leaders on evaluating trade-offs and ensuring innovation capacity. (MIT)
Interview - A conversation between Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg
At this week’s inaugural LlamaCon, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg discussed all the latest developments in AI, from deployment strategies, how to use AI in engineering and how to excel in today’s rapidly evolving environment. LlamaCon is Meta’s first Llama-branded AI developer event which also included some new releases, including a new API. (Meta)
AI Agents come to payments
Mastercard has unveiled Agent Pay - a new AI Agent payment method that will allow users to make payments via AI Agents. In a press release announcing the feature they gave the example of a small textile enterprise that will be able to use their AI agent to handle sourcing, optimize payment terms and manage logistics with an international supplier. From there, the AI agent can complete the cross-border purchase using a Mastercard virtual corporate card token and arrange for cost-effective, expedited delivery. Mastercard says that it is working with Microsoft to fit into its Copilot ecosystem too.
Perplexity is now available on WhatsApp. Users can interact with Perplexity directly within WhatsApp and while functionality is limited, the CEO says it has plans to support voice mode, videos, fact checking and group chats - as well as its native assistant. This seems to fit neatly into the company’s “everything, everywhere all at once strategy”.
Lyft has launched an AI “Earnings Assistant” targeting drivers. It is designed to help drivers earn more money by creating driving plans based on information about things like airport arrivals and local events. It’s currently only available by joining a waitlist but, like Uber’s own driving AI Assitant, it shows that product teams are increasingly building chatbot features targeted to specific user segments.
New MCP server releases
Everyone’s talking about MCP. Here’s a selection of freshly released MCP servers worth knowing about:
Auth0’s new MCP server lets developers manage user identity infrastructure
ElevenLabs’ MCP server lets you use Claude to build voice agents
PayPal’s new MCP server lets users create invoices with Claude
Plus…
DuoLingo’s CEO has announced that the company is also going “AI-first”. He likened the shift to AI to the company’s previous bet on mobile in 2012, saying that AI has made it possible to create content that would otherwise take years. Increased head counts will only be permitted if it can be proven that AI can’t do the job…
Vibe coding app Lovable has released a major new update. Lovable 2.0 comes with multi-user capabilities where you can share your creations with colleagues - and perhaps most importantly, a new security scanning feature that scans your codebase before shipping to production.
Meta’s CTO says AI could make apps irrelevant
Could AI ultimately kill the idea of apps entirely? There are some insightful predictions here for product teams around the future of apps, UX and the relationship between brands and users.
Tools you can use
Vy by Vercept - an AI agent for your operating system. No more clicking, memorizing shortcuts, or navigating menus. Just tell Vy what you need.
Lately - helps you and your colleagues arrive on time for meetings and catch ups.
Airtime - a new product from the founder of Evernote that transforms how you do presentations.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Meta has launched a dedicated Meta AI as it attempts to beat rivals like ChatGPT and this week, Google announced that Gemini has reached 350 million monthly active users. Here’s how each of the AI chatbot competitors currently stack up based on what we know so far:
Spotify’s monthly active users grew 10% Y/Y to 678 million, with growth across all regions, led by Rest of World and Latin America. Premium Subscribers increased 12% Y/Y to 268 million, with 5 million net additions in Q1 2025, the highest Q1 net additions since 2020 and the second-highest in Spotify’s history.
57% of workers hide their use of AI at work from their boss according to the latest KPG Trust in AI Study. Over half of employees also say they’ve used AI at work in non-compliant ways. Full report.
Snap posted revenue of $1.36 billion, up 14%, and a net loss of $140 million (an improvement over a $305 million net loss a year ago). One nugget from their earnings update is quite interesting for product teams: the company says it’s recently been testing a simplified version of its UX and that this simplified version of the app led to increases in daily content views - particularly among more casual users. But, this simplified version actually alienated power users and so Snap is planning to proceed with a new update that simplifies some elements but retains the 5 icon navigation. See page 2 of their earnings letter.
Between 20-30% of all code at Microsoft is now AI generated according to CEO Satya Nadella.
Google’s experiments with new Search UX seems to be paying off. According to their latest earnings report: Circle to Search usage has increased 40% in the current quarter and Visual searches with Lens have increased by five billion since October.
Javascript and Typescript are the most popular programming languages for software engineers using Claude accounting for over 30% of use cases and top use cases include UX / UI component design and mobile app development. Anthropic’s Economic Index report.
The number of apps in the Android App store has dropped from 3.4 million to 1.8 million just over a year.
Other product news in brief
Discord’s co-founder and CEO is stepping down.
Reddit has banned a group of researchers who flooded it with bots to test their impact on changing people’s attitudes.
Deepseek is hiring for an “urgent” role in product and design.
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