DoP Deep: What AI features are product teams building? Part 3
A deeper look at how top tech companies are integrating AI into their products - with inspiration for your own
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive them you can do so below. Or you can find out more about what you get as a paid subscriber here.
Hi product people 👋,
“I hate to tell you, but I think this stuff is under-hyped, not over-hyped.” That was ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assessment of AI last week. Despite many predicting a downturn, funding for AI companies has actually increased so far this year - and product teams are still churning out AI features, with varying degrees of success.
This fresh batch of companies we’ve chosen this time includes new features from 20+ companies including Chrome, Slack, Docusign, Yelp, Google Maps, Pinterest, Airbnb, Replit, Airtable and others.
The new AI features include the use of Assistants / chatbots, machine learning, UX enhancers and other categories - with notes and guidance on how you can use these features to help shape your own product’s AI strategy and principles.
Coming up:
The top categories of AI features: from UX enhancers and AI Assistants to new AI APIs
New AI features shipped by Chrome, Slack, Docusign, Yelp, Google Maps, Pinterest, Airbnb, Replit, Airtable and others
How to use these new features to inform your product’s AI strategy
The full list of the AI features recently released from 20+ top tier companies - with links to each one
PS if you missed the previous editions of this DoP Deep dive on AI features you can find those here, too (part 1, part 2).
How this analysis is structured
To help us get to grips with the various different types of new AI features that companies have released over the past 3 months, we’ve taken the time to structure the new features using the following:
The company
The AI feature category
The feature itself and how it works
A link to an example of each AI feature
Here’s a sample of some of the companies featured in this edition:
Each of the AI features we’ve highlighted in this edition fall into one of these 5 categories:
Embedded assistants - an AI powered assistant that is embedded inside the core product and is designed to complement the value proposition in some way
New standalone products - AI powered, standalone products that are separate to the core product offering
UX enhancers - AI powered features designed to make it easier to use an existing product or improve the overall user experience in some way
Productivity boosters / time savers - AI-powered features designed to boost the productivity of users
ML intelligence / data analysis - AI powered machine learning models deployed to add value or uncover insights
Since AI capabilities are starting to mature in some companies, these categories have evolved since the last time we looked at AI features in depth. For example, the standalone AI product category now also includes examples of API products for the first time.
The full list of all the product features included in this Deep Dive is available at the end of the post and we’ve hand picked some of them to dive into in the meantime.
Let’s start with Yelp.
Yelp
Categories: New standalone products, AI assistant
Yelp may not be the sexiest of products, but their recent AI efforts are worth paying attention to. Two of the company’s major new AI features they recently launched include: the Yelp Assistant and the Yelp Fusion AI API.
First, let’s look at their assistant. In this video, Yelp’s CPO explains what the new AI-powered assistant and new API are designed to do: