OpenAI vs Microsoft, Lovable's $50m milestone, Mary Meeker returns
Plus: Perplexity’s new Labs feature turns your ideas and analysis into mini apps, how to screen for AI fluency, product “taste” explained
Hi product people 👋, Rich here with your weekly briefing.
Coming up this week, new court documents reveal OpenAI’s H1 product strategy and their ambitious plans to become a super assistant, pitting it directly against Microsoft and Google. Perplexity unveils a new “Labs” feature that allows users to create mini apps (one user has already created a mini SaaS clone) and a new tool that lets you get instant research answers from any of your user segments.
I also take a look at everything you need to know from Mary Meeker’s AI trends report 2025 and Shopify’s Director of Product for Payments and Cross Border shares some insights from challenges they faced in releasing their new payments feature in a personal voice note for DoP readers.
Happy Friday and have a great weekend!
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Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product:
Knowledge Series - How do AI coding agents work?
In this Knowledge Series, we’re going to take a closer look at how these AI coding agents actually work. We’ll explore the core technologies behind them, the key aspects of the software engineering SWE-bench test and how assigning Jira / Linear tasks to an autonomous agent actually works with real world examples.
Analysis - Mary Meeker’s AI Trends Report 2025: Everything you need to know from the ~340 page deck
Mary Mika returns with the first State of the Nation-style Trends Report since 2019. We delve into the key insights from the dense ~340-page report, focusing on the exponential growth and usage of ChatGPT. Explore the dominance of conversational interfaces, the rise in AI model adoption, and the future predictions for AI applications. (Department of Product)
A Voice note of Wisdom
A personal insight into the real world challenges faced by global product leaders. In partnership with Shopify.
In this personal voice note, Shopify’s Rohit Mishra, Director of Product for Payments and Cross-Border explains how he and his team approached building the company’s new multi-currency payouts and multi-business entity support that lets merchants settle payments in local currencies as their business scales.
His voice note of wisdom explains some of the lessons his team learned throughout this process with some guidance on how to approach adding new, more complex features - without harming the overall UX of your product.
More reads to feed your product brain:
How market research is evolving (Andreessen Horowitz)
How to screen for AI fluency (ex Microsoft engineer)
ex-Bumble CEO on why she turned down a huge partnership opportunity for product growth (New York Times)
Product “taste” explained (Sara Guo)
OpenAI’s battle for the workplace begins
It’s becoming clearer why cracks started to emerge between OpenAI and Mirosoft late last year.
Leaked Court documents released as part of the antitrust case against Google revealed that ChatGPT’s H1 product strategy includes the ultimate goal of building a “super assistant”. The documents are heavily redacted but we do see that this assistant is designed to be “T-shaped” - with breadth and depth across specific categories. One of these is managing workplace calendars, email and to dos and OpenAI’s announcements this week seem to be the first steps towards achieving that goal.
This week, OpenAI has taken its first steps towards becoming a major rival with a bunch of new workplace product announcements for ChatGPT. This includes:
“Connectors” that plug tools like Outlook and Google Drive into ChatGPT
Deep research enhancements that plug in external apps like Hubspot or Outlook
A new “record mode” that records, transcribes and summarizes meetings
I’m just wondering what the mystery “two moats” mentioned in the document that are redacted are…
Meanwhile…
Google Drive has revealed some new Gemini-powered features including a new “Catch me up” shortcut that lets you review recent edits that have been made in Google Docs. I remain thoroughly unconvinced that brute-forcing Gemini into every Google app is necessary - especially for potentially sensitive documents. On the plus side, Google has doubled down on the success of NotebookLM and this week announced that users can now publish their Notebooks.
AI startup Genspark has launched what it calls “Your AI Secretary” which can manage your Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Notion. In a demo released on their YouTube channel, they show how it’s possible to batch reply to a bunch of product manager interview candidates in one go, with a personalized response for each one.
Perplexity has launched a new feature called “Labs” that lets you transform research into multi-page apps. Their CEO says it brings together deep web browsing, code execution and chart / image creation in one place. Here’s a sample Lab it created and here’s an example of a mini app clone of Splitwise it created in one shot. The company is also rumored to be exploring a potential partnership with Samsung that could see it come pre-installed on their devices. And Stripe’s CEO said a new demo of Perplexity’s agentic payment capabilities left him surprised that adoption was happening so quickly.
In other news…
WhatsApp is finally letting users create an account and login with a username rather than just a telephone number. Anyone who has worked on replacing login methods on large products knows this can be a difficult job and this could mark the first step away from WhatsApp being a phone-centric app, especially given the recent iPad app launch.
Meta is reported to be planning to release a tool that will allow advertisers to use AI end to end to create ad campaigns for the first time. The new tool would allow teams to upload an image of their product along with budgetary goals and AI handles the rest. Sam Altman has previously said that AI would replace 95% of ad agency work.
Tools you can use
Tyce - the AI agent for smarter documents. Use your company’s knowledge to instantly power and personalise your documents.
Semilattice - use an AI model of your audience to get answers to questions instantly.
PromptMonitor - SEO is dying but GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is on the rise. This tool monitors how your product ranks in AI tools.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
AI startups are reaching annual recurring revenue milestones in record time. Vibe coding tool Lovable hit $50m annual recurring revenue in just 6 months:
GitHub’s Copilot generated $500 million in revenue last year according to new reports. New entrants like Cursor and Windsurf are most at risk of being beaten by big tech.
Morgan Stanley says it saved its engineering team 280,000 hours of work thanks to a new tool it built in-house called DevGen. The tool can translate old legacy code into plain English specs that engineers can then use to rewrite in modern languages - reducing tech debt.
Over 70% of Americans say they wouldn’t ride in a robotaxi. Meanwhile, Waymo is currently completing a quarter of a million paid rides per week.
Less than 3% of European tech startups ever reach €100 in annual recurring revenue. But AI and automation is opening leadership opportunities, with European players such as ElevenLabs, Mistral AI, and Wayve emerging as major global contenders. New McKinsey report on Europe’s tech ecosystem.
The share of “AI-doable tasks” in online job postings has declined by 19%. And the number of job posts most exposed to AI has dropped 31% vs 25% for lower exposed jobs in the past 3 years.
A new AI phone support startup called Phonely says it has improved its phone support accuracy from 81.5% to 99.2% - surpassing GPT-4o by 4.5%.
Other product news in brief
🧑⚖️Deel is counter suing Rippling, accusing it of spying by ‘impersonating’ a customer.
🚫Reddit is suing Anthropic, alleging unauthorised use of the site’s data.
🤖 Anthropic’s Claude now has its own engineering blog. It’s a collection of articles, mostly focused around engineering practices and is overseen by a set of human editors. Here’s a post on simplifying complex codebases.
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