Perplexity enters the AI browser wars and a new competitor to Google Analytics used by teams at OpenAI

Plus: Microsoft and Replit buddy up, new data on how AI is transforming the speed of pull requests and Reddit groups for chatbot addiction

Hi product people 👋, Rich here with your weekly product briefing.

Coming up this week, Perplexity enters the AI browser wars with its next generation browser and a new analytics product founded by the former VP of Design at Meta grabs $23 million in funding to create product analytics fit for the AI age.

Plus, a closer look at the new State of Engineering Management report and why this matters for product velocity and has Apple started to rollback Liquid Design after all? The latest beta update suggests that may be the case.

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

More: Watch on YouTube / Follow on Substack Notes / Unlock the Full Newsletter

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Perplexity enters the AI browser wars

First up this week, after months of hype, Perplexity’s new AI browser, Comet, has finally launched. It’s currently available for Max users of Perplexity and like other AI browsers, Comet is able to reference tabs for tasks like online Shopping or content comparison, summarize YouTube videos and even perform actions on your behalf.

As you’d expect from Perplexity, the marketing materials are pretty slick but after spending a few days trialling it, there’s plenty of potential here - especially since it supports agentic actions and voice. But the current overall experience is a little clunkier and less responsive than competitors like Dia, especially when opening new tabs or loading pages. Given that this is still a very early version of the browser, these issues will likely get ironed out over the coming weeks.

A new analytics product called Sundial has raised $23 million to build what it calls analytics for the AI era. It counts companies like OpenAI and CharacterAI among its customers with OpenAI’s VP of analytics saying it “automated complex engineering tasks that would have taken months to build internally”. To do this, it comes with pre-packaged templates for analyzing growth, monetization and engagement. Given just how much of a mess GA4 is, there may indeed be a gap for a product that makes analytics simpler but it’s a notoriously difficult market to crack.

Microsoft and Replit have announced a new “strategic partnership” that will allow Microsoft users to create production-ready vibe coded apps that will get deployed into production using Azure. One of the biggest criticisms of vibe coded apps is their security vulnerabilities and this partnership should help to rectify some of those concerns. The release says that 500,000 business users are already building apps using Replit- from internal tools to customer-facing applications.

Meanwhile…

Apple has made some major changes to its Liquid Glass design system in the latest beta update of iOS26. Gone is the glass in Apple Music and in its place is a more traditional UI that users can actually read. It’s definitely an improvement (since you can now read it!) But what does this say about the future of Liquid Glass and the design philosophy that underpins it?

Google Workspace is getting some new Gemini-enabled features. Its custom built AI agents known as “Gems” will now appear in the sidebar of products like Google Docs. Some of the example gems include an OKR writer and a C-Suite persona that can pressure test content from a certain person’s perspective. You can also now use Gemini to perform actions like creating folders and files in Google Drive using natural language.

Even more ways to cheat…

Cluely, the startup that allows you to cheat in interviews, has launched a new enterprise version of its product that expands its use cases. Rather than solely focusing on interviews, it has expanded its cheating features to meetings, sales calls, customer support and product design. Here’s an example of it making UX / design decisions during the product process. Since its pivot to enterprise it has doubled its ARR to $7m.

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Key reads and resources for product teams

New from the Department of Product Substack this week:

Knowledge Series - Context Engineering for AI agents Explained

In the past week or so, it has recently gained some new backers: the CEO of Shopify and the co-founder of OpenAI. In this Knowledge Series, we’ll take a closer look at this emerging new concept of context engineering. We’ll explore what it is, the different types of context that you can give AI Agents and why this matters to product teams building AI features.

Deep dive - The new ways to do AI-powered user / market research explored

Agent simulations, AI moderated conversations, automated panel recruitment and more. How AI is transforming user and market research.If you’re interested in how AI is transforming user research and how it might be able to augment your product’s existing user research processes, this Deep dive should help. (Department of Product)

• Why observability is critical for AI agent systems (CEO, New Relic)

• 9 mistakes leaders make with AI Strategy (MIT Sloan)

• Wireflows explained - how to combine wireframes and workflows to bring user journeys to life (NN Group)

• How to attract new customers without alienating your existing ones (Harvard Business Review)

• Lies per second, Meetings per decision ratio and other important business metrics (Andrew Chen Substack)

A new procurement model for empowering product teams

Corporate credit card company Brex has adopted an innovative new model for navigating the ‘messiness’ of AI and figuring out which SaaS products to buy internally. It gives its engineers a monthly budget of $50 to license whatever approved software they want from an approved list. It helps the company figure out which tools are most popular - and negotiate better licenses for those - but also allows teams to pick more niche products for their own use cases.

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Tools you can use

LLM visualizer - teach yourself the fundamentals of LLMs using this interactive visualizer.

Shortcut - describes itself as the “first superhuman Excel agent”. It has near feature parity with Excel and can one-shot most tasks.

Runner - from a company that has raised $220 million in funding. Runner lets you “automate anything” - including finding a new job or getting a weekly recap of your work calendar on WhatsApp.

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📈 Product data and trends to stay informed

AI is saving engineering teams record amounts of time. With 51% of engineering teams’ pull requests in May 2025 now using AI - up from 14% last June. The average time saved per pull request has grown from 8.9 hours to 13.7 hours.

GitHub Copilot remains the AI tool of choice for most engineers and the adoption of AI doesn’t appear to be correlated with increases of bugs in production. State of Engineering Management Report 2025.

Middle managers are disappearing. New data from HR platform Gusto shows that people managers now oversee about twice as many workers as just five years ago. To be fair, these numbers are for small businesses only, but with the major cuts we’ve seen in big tech recently, the linear career path that many people in tech took for granted may no longer exist.

AI agents are better than LLMs at creating new ideas from patents. A new study tested a framework called Agent Ideate that uses patents and external search and found that 86% of human idea evaluators preferred the AI agent ideas.

But what happens if these ideas aren’t exactly to the benefit of humanity? In a recent talk, the co-founder of Machine Intelligence Research Institute warned that he believes there’s a 5-10% chance that humanity will be wiped out in the next two years.

A new AI-fueled trend is emerging: support groups for AI chatbot addiction. Reddit now has dedicated subreddits for r/Character_AI_recovery and r/ChatbotAddiction.

AI agents are better than LLMs at creating new ideas from patents. A new study tested a framework called Agent Ideate that uses patents and external search and found that 86% of human idea evaluators preferred the AI agent ideas.

The use of personality tests during the recruitment process is up 69% year on year. More companies are relying on aptitude and personality tests during the recruitment process as AI leads to candidates applying for jobs en masse.

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