#34 - The consumer AI apps breaking out in 2026 - Olivia Moore

0:00In this episode, I talked to Olivia Moore, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, one of the flagship venture capital firms of Silicon Valley. At A16Z, Olivia focuses on AI with a special focus on consumer AI apps, including which ones are trending, which ones are breaking through beyond just the tech crowd, and which ones are unlocking the most powerful new capabilities and benefits for you and me. Olivia and I cover a ton of topics in this conversation. We talk about A16Z's new report on the top 100 Gen AI consumer apps. We talk about the rise of open claw and personal AI agents in 2026. We talk about the evolution of AI tools and Olivia's personal AI stack. We talk about the central role that context and memory will play in the next stage of AI. We also talk about global trends, creative tools, switching costs, the acceleration of coding agents, and much, much more. More than anyone in the AI space right now, Olivia has her finger on the pulse of the AI app

1:04ecosystem. I'm confident you're going to come away from this conversation with at least one tool that's going to change the way you work. You can hold me to that. Here it is, our conversation with Olivia Moore of A16Z. Olivia, I would love it if you could talk a little bit about what A16Z does, Andrews and Horowitz, well known to probably most of our audience, but just in case, you know, for those few that would like to know and understand more, tell us a little bit about the company, but also your role at the company and what you do. Yeah, no, it's a great question. We are a global venture firm founded by Mark and Jason and Ben Horowitz. We invest across essentially every stage and in basically every sector as well, so seed all the way to growth and beyond. Applications, infrastructure, crypto, bio-healthcare, and I would say that the kind of mission of the firm is to be a part of every important technology story, so our job is to kind of find and partner with the best startups.

2:08My role, because we have a lot of different roles and funds within the firm, I sit within our early stage AI applications group, which essentially means mostly leading kind of seed series A, series B investments, and largely in companies that are building AI more at the product layer than the model layer. So our infrastructure team does all the fantastic, like foundation model investments, and then on our side, we invest in things that are selling directly to consumers, SMB enterprise, prosumers, and it's just been a crazy and fun, I guess, two and a half, three years now. I've been in venture for a decade and right now is definitely the most fun and the most exciting it's ever been. So yeah, it's just, it's an awesome time to be building a startup. Wow, and have you been working on AI the whole time you've been at A16Z? The first two years or so was pre-AI. It's funny to think now that like the first, I think, real indicator of what was to come was was mid journey actually in kind of summer 2022, but before that I was doing

3:09mostly non-AI consumer software, and it's interesting to think back because you can see all these platform shifts, especially in consumer, like web was the first platform shift and then mobile, and now AI. And kind of as you get to the tail end of a platform shift, most of the good ideas have been built, right? So a lot of what you're seeing is kind of marginal, and some of them can still break out and become fantastic companies. But once a new platform comes along, there's just so many more exciting opportunities to invest in. So that's what we've been doing for the past few years. You have been really looking at this sort of personal stack of AI apps too. You know, I have been trying to learn more about this, you know, as you know, we talked a little bit about that I've only been at the deep view for three months, and my thesis was that I wanted to spend my time writing about thinking about reading about learning about all of this stuff more because there was so much, and even though we were covering it, you know, when I was at ZNet before,

4:11I covered it just enough. We covered it just enough for me to just know that there's so much that I'm missing, right? That I can't keep up with. And it's like I want to keep up with it. And one of the things that I found last year that I enjoyed so much was your story on your AI stack, and you had a number of tools there that I hadn't heard of. This is a video, people can still fight. It's a video on YouTube that you did. I mean, you all do a lot of your own content. You all are an incredible content machine, in addition to being a VC, you know, from Mark on down, everybody, you know, seems like is very active on Twitter. A lot of prolific posters. Yes. Yes. We can talk a little bit about that because among all the venture firms out there, you know, it seems to be such a core part of the DNA there. But this one video was really inspiring to me because I found several tools there that were incredibly helpful. You know, one of them, maybe the first one that comes to mind is happenstance. So for those who aren't familiar, happenstance

5:13will take your network on LinkedIn, Twitter, your contacts. You can, you can connect it to email. And email. Yes. Thank you. And then it will, it will make connections. You can ask it. Find me, CTOs working in healthcare in the San Francisco Bay area. And it will look on your sort of connection, second connection. And it'll give you like this list of like 30 people. And you're like, what? I never could have found this, right? Totally. It's amazing. I use that product all the time. I think that's also a great example of like, yes, LinkedIn exists. And yes, you have all of this kind of ambient existing data about who you know and who others that you know also know. But now with AI, you can productize that into something that's like so much more powerful and so much easier than trying to like buy a LinkedIn sales license and then like set up a bunch of workflows and things like that. And so yeah, I think we have already seen many, many products that kind of up the game

6:16like that. And I think there'll be a lot more to come. It's so that I remember other ones from that list too. I remember that list was the first time I heard about granola. Yes. Which is now taken on a life of its own. Always become a bit of a viral sort of hit. It's one of the ones that I find has some consumer awareness, you know, even as well. Broadly. And so for those who aren't familiar, granola is something that you can record phone calls. Actually, I shouldn't say record. It will take notes for you on phone calls or meetings, but it doesn't have an agent that sits there or anything. It's just sort of taking the transcript. And then you can put your notes at the same time and think like your thoughts maybe that weren't mentioned in the call and it will align them. And it's a really powerful way to be able to collect all of that stuff. And I found that to be, you know, a really useful tool that your video is the first time I saw that one. And I'll mention

7:17another one overlap. I remember was on your list too. And that's when now, of course, now doing the podcast. We just relaunched this podcast about six weeks ago. And now we're like, okay, we need the clip part of this. Like we need to get that going. And I had a demo with them just a couple weeks ago. I had, again, first heard about it when you mentioned it in that video. And finally, connected with them now that we're doing the podcast. And I'm like, this is an incredible tool. It will take a video. It will, you can tune it a bit to your own preferences and that. And then it can even make a bunch of clips for you that you can approve. Or if you get to the point where you're confident with it, it can just send it to all the networks that you want. So I really have you today for those. Those are three just off the top of my head from that video. And I think you had about 10 of them on there. Yeah. A lot of those products have had real staying power as well. I think granola is a great example because when you're able to capture that kind of quality and density of data, it really becomes a moat in that it's the switching costs are very high. If I

8:22were to like leave granola for another product because it just knows so much about me at this point. But yeah, I totally agree with what you said in that. My job here is basically to be on top of all of the great consumer and prosumer AI products that are coming out every day. And yet I often feel underwater and like I'm not seeing it's hard to keep up with seeing everything every day. And so yeah, I love just kind of getting to to summarize at least some of what we're seeing with others. This episode of the deep view conversations is brought to you by JetBrains. If you're building an AI right now, you already know the difference between shipping and stalling often comes down to having the right tools. Early on, every decision compounds. The frameworks you choose, the infrastructure you bet on and the development tools your team uses every single day. That's why more than 55,000 startups, 65 unicorns and 15 million developers globally trust JetBrains. These are the same tools used by engineers at 90 of the Fortune Global top 100 companies. If you're an early stage startup,

9:27JetBrains makes it easier to get rolling through the JetBrains startup program accepted startups receive 50% off on licenses across IDEs, team tools, and JetBrains AI for up to 10 users over five years. That's long term support while you go from MVP to product market fit to scale. If you're building something ambitious, whether it's AI agents, inference, infrastructure, or the next breakout developer platform, your tools should grow with you. You can learn more and apply to the JetBrains startup program at JetBrains.com slash startups. That's JetBrains.com slash startups. Build fast, build well, and do it with tools that are built by developers for developers. We thank JetBrains for their support of the deep view. And now back to the conversation. It's really exciting when you see somebody discover one of these tools too. I have a friend

10:28who works in a, he does not work in the tech space. He's an educator. He works in a non-profit. When he signed up for our newsletter, the deep view, granola was one of our, we have this little quiz you do. What are you interested in? What would help you? And then we sort of spit out a few tools. These are a couple tools you might want to try. And he had told me when I started the job like the first week, like a good friend, he signed up to the deep view. You know, AI's in tech isn't necessarily his domain, but he was being so supportive. And he said, hey, when I signed up for your newsletter, it told me about this tool. It said this would be a good one that helped me, granola. And he said because I'm in meetings a lot. And he said this thing is like incredible for me. It has been, I can have it turn it on. It's not like this thing that I have to put in the meeting and then people ask questions or they sort of have a, you know, they feel, you know, awkward or that kind of thing, or some of these agents will even sort of crash meetings sometimes. And so he said this has been,

11:33you know, such a, you know, a game changer. And I love it. So seeing those kinds of things is really rewarding. I'm sure you must have some of those experiences where people in your life who know what you do are like, okay, tell me what tool, you know, I should be trying. All the time. And it's actually very good research even for us because I'm not technical. And in some ways in consumer that's actually an advantage because I am probably closer to the experience of what an average user on voting to a product is going to feel like. So I always ask myself the question, like, would I actually complete the sign up for this? And then what I keep using it if I wasn't looking at it to invest in, like just as a normal consumer using a product. But I'm also able to very quickly see if I hand a product to like my mom, my little brother, my cousins, like, you can see very quickly if something kind of has the spark to catch and retain the mainstream consumer. And I think that's a perspective that is is hard to kind of stay in touch with if you're

12:33in the like ex tech Twitter VC world all the time, which is fantastic. But I mean, open clause example of like that is such a usable product and a fantastic product for that ecosystem. And it has not escaped containment to the mainstream consumer. Yes. Yes. Oh, boy, we were going to talk about agents. We will definitely come back to that topic. How about from that list even last year, Olivia, do you still use most of those tools? Like that was your tech stack that you did. I want to say it was the summer last year for remembering, right? Yeah. Or most of those still on your list. Yeah, most almost all of them still are like granola, gamma, the perplexity, comet browser. I still think is kind of the best in class AI browser. It's interesting because for me with AI software, I'm not necessarily seeing myself replacing things like oh, I no longer use this tool. I use that tool, but just actually expanding the number of tools I use. And I think that's especially been

13:35true the last two or three months as both chat GBT and Claude have added all of these connectors and apps where like now actually I'm probably using these tools more because I can kind of orchestrate my use of them through a very clean consumer interface that owns all this memory and context on me. That brings up a perfect question for you. And especially because you mentioned perplexity, you know, comet as well. I also been using it. I essentially harassed their PR people until they gave me an early version of it, you know, last summer and have loved using it. It's so interesting both that it has some of theseogenic things like it can do some things for you and to be able to have it by default, you know, be able to use it as your way to find stuff. And one of the things I did is I made Google the default search engines. So if I went to the bar up at the top and I put there, I could get to Google and but then the new tab was always a perplexity search.

14:40And of course, you can do the different models. So for all those reasons, I loved it, still love it. One of the things that's been a challenge for me and this is what I love your perspective on because and it does get to agents a little bit. But I've been using and trying over the past couple months or at least past month, especially the the agent that's in chat GPT, chat GPT pulse. And what I found is the more that like anything in these AIs, the more they know about you, right, the better they can more helpful they can be proactively. So what I found is I also use chat GPT Atlas, their browser. So I sort of have them both. I have that I use different things like one, I have more social media and when I do more like researching and what I found was and I wonder if this starts to become a part of the the mode or part of the thing to think about with these. Because I was using a been using pulse, I found myself wanting to use chat GPT Atlas a little bit more because I'm like if I put some of that stuff in there, it's going to know what I'm doing

15:43and what I'm thinking about and learning about right now. And then it's going to start sending me some cards of like you've been trying to learn more about, you know, the finance of this hundred billion dollar, you know, deal for chat for open AI. And so we're going to send you some information that will be proactive about that. What are your thoughts about about that? Does data start to become the mode? Do we start to want to use products when we become cognizant the fact that oh, the more context I give in them, it can be more helpful for me. This is actually very well time because this is one of my favorite topics and I think that we're seeing this really start to play out now because previously there's been very little switching costs going from like one one horizontal LLM to another like clawed chat GPT Gemini. Lots of people might multi tenant clawed as you probably saw recently, launches feature of like export your memory and come over to us. And I think in the past that has been very doable in the switching costs have been low. I predict a couple of things are going to happen in the next year that raise those switching costs a bit and people

16:47might start to kind of double down on one platform. I think the memory in the context layer that you mentioned is one of the most important ones, especially because Sam Altman kind of hinted earlier this year that chat GPT is going to launch authenticate with chat GPT as a layer across other AI products. So then basically you can use your chat GPT memory and your tokens to go use other tools and then it'll know so much about you you know on first sign up. And so in that world I'm also wanting to use chat GPT more so that it has the most up to date picture of kind of who I am. Two other things on that I think one clawed and chat GPT are both investing in like app stores and MCPs. And we might kind of see a little bit of an iOS Android things start to play out where developers kind of choose this is who I'm going to ship to first this is who I'm going to build the most sophisticated product. And then the last thing I think is we've seen launches of things like

17:49chat GPT group chats which I would say was early it's I would guess it's doing fine but not amazing. But if you imagine a world where there's like a really great product actually an AI product that you're communicating with other people within then I think that also kind of locks you in because if you're going to turn you have to pull them all with you. So I think you're right that we're going to start to see higher switching costs and more lock-in. That's going to be really interesting to watch and it does start to become there's a little bit of some some tug of war and the thing is is the pace of new features is so amazing right now and I'm also cognizant of like you said like it's a little different for those of us that are that live and breathe this stuff every day but like new capabilities come and you want to if you're if you're aware of aware of them like you want to try them you're like whoa that's a really interesting new thing and and it tugs at you a little bit and so the I realize it's a little specialized but probably the folks in this our audience are most of the folks in our audience I

18:51will admit the deep view audience there are folks who work in AI or work with AI pretty pretty daily so they're probably aware of this and thinking about it as well so it's going to be really I think it's going to be to your point we're going to be a little more conflicted I think in 2026 then we have been previously because that context starts to become a really really powerful factor. I totally agree and obviously we're seeing all of the major kind of labs and incumbents like fighting for the mainstream consumer in their own way probably to get that context layer and that lock-in. I feel like they're doing it all with slightly different strategies like Sam has said he wants Chatchy BT to be for everyone which includes you know free usage and ads Claude is really doubling down on kind of prosumer if you actually look at the there's like 200 plus apps now that you can use in both Chatchy BT and Claude and there's only 11% overlap between them which is crazy like they are really focused on different audiences. That is such a great stat I did not have awareness of that at all that's so interesting

20:00and you write like my sense is they do tend to be diverging much more the two of them although this past week was just sort of a little bit bananas right maybe there's this industry has been the news cycle has been crazy for three years but his last week was like nothing I've ever seen like it was and it was also at the level of people beyond it had broken beyond AI it had broken beyond tech it was sort of like everywhere everywhere I went everything the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was like the AI thing which was pretty wild. You saw Katie Perry getting in the getting in the race this week tweeting about Claude which is something I never would have expected and so I think that's probably a good good signal of what's been happening it's interesting too because like for the vast majority of the US population they will know Chatchy BT and they will probably know Gemini just because it's distributed through the Google products they use all the time but we saw this with deepseek as well we're like almost for any

21:01other product all press is good press in the sense that like most people have not had not heard of Claude before this week right and I think what we saw with with a deepseek was that it drove a huge amount of volume and traffic to the product and then there was no really like killer feature to retain people so outside of markets like China and Russia where other LLM products are kind of sanctioned we haven't seen continued usage I'm going to be really curious to see what the numbers for Claude look like in the US in a couple months like do they hold on to a lot of users do they turn what happens there me too you know it's interesting that brought up another thing that I was thinking about this week which is that last Saturday I had a friend who also this is someone who doesn't work in tech doesn't really follow tech that closely but you know is is also you know interested they know what I do right and so and came to me and said I have to tell you I tried AI for the first time and so I was like well but they also they use they use some AI tools but

22:08they for them that was like a chatbot I used a chatbot for the first time and they're like I had I used it to do two things and they said I'm I'm a little bit ticked off and I'm also a little amazed okay and they had to do it they had to help them write a speech like a sort of you know person in a personal life you know like a social gathering and then they they work in academia so they were working on a very important presentation and they were trying to work on their thinking like unfolding a topic so the speech was great they said it it saved me it was gonna take me 45 minutes I did it in five like it wrote something up then I edited it and we were done and I was I was so happy and he said I was a little upset because it was good and it was better than anything I would have written and so I was like okay and he said but this one is what I really want to show you and they they were so excited by this they wanted to show me the whole thinking that they had back and forth but what they did I should say they did claw they downloaded clawed this is what amazed me like they started their first time they've ever used a chatbot they like so I downloaded

23:11clawed on my phone and my wife was driving and the whole time I was chatting back and forth of it I had to write the best man's speech or whatever that speech was it was something like that and then the other and then I had this this this presentation I'm working on this academic praise presentation I need to submit you know in the next couple weeks and he showed me the thinking and I was really amazed and he showed me you know how he had started it and he essentially had this like six um thread back and forth uh with yeah clawed about this topic and am I explaining it clearly and does this you know patch and then it asked clawed asked for more context it's like when you said this I wasn't quite sure do you mean x or do you mean y and it did it and he said I was impressed that it did you know all of that like it when it didn't know like it asked me for more context and I and he wrote a couple paragraphs you know even with his thumbs in the car and it was really wild to me because one he started with clawed he'd never used to chat tp tp before yeah so the first place he went was clawed because this wasn't last Saturday so that DC

24:12in the news yes it was it was everywhere so he started with clawed and then he had what what I thought would be not the sort of thing I would see somebody start with you typically start with like the same things you would ask google right yes but he was somebody who very quickly figured out oh if I give this thing more context if I have a very um in depth back and forth I could get to something really amazing and powerful and and that would have been like having a conversation with a colleague or or an expert you know and that sort of amazed me that we're at a point now that even the the chatbot itself could get somebody to engage at that level and I was like whoa this is this is different than even just like six months ago when people were using chat bots for the first time so I thought I'd share that and see you probably have some similar kinds of things that you're seeing yeah I love that story because I think it's a really good example of the fact that like actually um it feels like AI is everywhere right now and yet like only 10% of the global

25:14population is using Chatchee BT on a weekly basis and kind of the crazy thing about that is actually we're seeing the first use experience get better and better and better and better every single month so like people who start on Chatchee BT or clawed this month are going to have such a better experience than you know of a first month experience than someone who started like a year and a half ago we actually see this playing out in retention cohorts on the consumer side we almost you almost never see them kind of smile back up which is like more people people reactivate and actually spend more time on it over time which we are seeing like the first year post-lons of Chatchee BT it didn't really get much better uh and so the usage kind of plateaued and then over the last two years it's gotten a lot better and the cohorts are like really highly correlated with kind of the release of new models and new features um and then the other thing we're seeing is just the most recent cohorts start from a much higher retention and engagement standpoint

26:17just because the product is so much more able to like meet their needs and so it's wild to think like what that will look like 10 years from now if we've already seen so much improvement in the last two or three wow no that's such a great insight Olivia I appreciate the data on that's funny one of the things I was going to ask you about is I had read this data point and I wanted to see it was consistent with what you've seen that like on a on a monthly basis it's even was 13% is what I saw and you said it on a weekly it's you know 10% and so to me that says and I I was wanted to get your sense of it like we are still so early at the beginning of the curve right like we're just barely there's this sense that like this thing has played itself out and maybe you know they're we're gonna you know have a a point where people are like oh this just isn't as useful and maybe it was overhyped my sense is not that though my sense is like we're still sort of so early at the curve and that point that insight you mentioned of like the user experience when you start now is actually much stickier because you have an experience like my friend who you know very

27:24quickly did two things that it saved him a lot of time and not only saved him time but made the outputs the outcomes better looking back on this say like five or 10 years from now I think it'll be kind of like the transition we saw in the late 90s early 2000s where at that time like a dot com company was like a specific designator of a unique type of technology and then like five years later every software company was a dot com company every like everyone has a website and I think we'll see and so like you don't even say dot com anymore right that's right that's right and I think in like five years every technology company will be an AI company and every AI company will be a genetic and an agent company and so we won't even be probably using words like AI or agent anymore because it's just gonna be baked into everything that we use like electricity or chips like yes it's just the infrastructure that our world runs on um I'm glad you brought up agenda because I was thinking even like six months from now if somebody started um you know like

28:28like somebody that starts six months from now you know like my my friend um that my sense is that it not only is it gonna say uh I can help you with that but what would can I do can I take some steps for you and do something and create it and send it to your email and can I email you the link to this presentation that I've also just turned that into slides for you or something you know that's absolutely coming I think it's already here on a bunch of products like I'm starting to see clawed co-work begin to reach outside of the tech bubble a little bit into broader knowledge work okay um but I think overall the open claw kind of architecture in my opinion will will be like the big tech unlock of of 2026 I meet with so many founders every day who have been inspired by that or we're already building around that and yeah it's just such a you can to your point like you can deliver outcomes uh not just kind of like inputs anymore to users

29:29which is so much more powerful and like open claw itself fantastic product I have used it loved it it's not consumer grade and so I think we're gonna see whether it's open AI now that they acquired it they'll productize it into something more uh accessible and then I think we'll see a bunch of founders and and independent builders build their own version of something like an open claw for specific use cases boy I agree this this um this movement open claw really clawed like clawed code yeah which had become pretty agentic even at the end of last year and then they were like okay let's make co-work so it's like a little friendlier yes yes and then open claw like all the sudden it's like personal AI agent thing we've been hearing agents a year and for about a year there were enterprise use cases last year I mean even like Salesforce is talking about they might change their name to agent force you know I mean that it's having that much of a moment in the enterprise but this like personal AI agent really has exploded even just like at the last eight weeks um into the

30:32consciousness in the in the AI space in some really some really powerful ways like you said the barriers to do open claw pretty high like you have to in the command line and all of that so it's it's not something that we're gonna see millions of people adopt anytime soon but the but it has shown sort of the path and I think what you're saying is what we should expect a lot of people would be walking on this path yes yes and building all sorts of things like I think that the idea behind open claw at least in my opinion is like previously you as a consumer or a user had to like pull AI into what you were doing and like ask for help and give it specific instructions and with open claw you can kind of delegate it a high-level task and it will like push into the world and like do things for you and check with you when it needs to but I think that that is just like a fundamental shift in how we think about what software can do for us and there's going to be dozens hundreds of big big companies that are kind of built around that ethos but

31:36doing different things yes so I'd love to get your thought on one other thing regarded that and we'll probably come back around to agents because we're going to talk about some research that you have as well to see how this has been an example to me of like how fast almost like unbelievably fast this space is moving when open claw really burst onto the scene over you know a number of weeks yes to the point like within a month then you know they're talking to open AI and open AI you know buys yes well they they hired Peter Steinberger the the founder of open open claw and then open claw itself becomes a foundation so that it remains open source and really the idea and Sam Altman talked about like the idea was we're going to hire Peter Steinberger to come and take open claw what he did there this AI agent this personal AI agent that works on behalf of you and is so proactive in working for you and we're going to make it a product and

32:38available for everybody we're going to essentially turn it into a consumer product like chat GPT and it's like that sounds exciting we'll see that you know that'll take two or three months right and then the following week perplexity computer came out and it was like it was almost like everything that Sam had talked about the week before perplexity computer came out and they had essentially all of like almost all of it solved and I've learned since that they had just germinated the idea at CES it was two people at wow on their team germinating the idea at CES that became perplexity computer essentially like eight weeks later right after so they had started germinated even before open claw had kind of become its its sort of viral hit but that is such an indication of the incredible velocity in AI feels like even in the past eight weeks 12 weeks a month even has accelerated to a level that is really kind of mind boggling and I have to

33:40think this is part I would love your opinion on one if you're seeing the same thing but also I think part of it is the tools themselves because of all of these builders having access to agents now like it's almost like one person has can do the work of 10 because they are using these tools in such smart ways especially builders developers you know entrepreneurs and that seems to take what something that was already accelerating at an insane pace and just taking it to a level that we haven't seen before I totally agree yeah I was um talking with one of my portfolio companies last night and like just the leverage that they're getting from products like you know cursor and codex and cloud code has allowed them to build so much faster they say their problem now actually they are not they're no longer bottlenecks by like build speed or build capacity which historically has been the bottleneck the bottleneck now is them deciding what is actually a good thing to ship what is actually like a good feature that will enhance the product rather than detract from it because it's so easy to build everything so quickly I think the other interesting thing and this

34:44is kind of on like the perplexity computer point is what's pretty unique now is that largely all of the best in class models are not just held within the company that created them and used for their own products but they're available to build on so like perplexity computer is largely I believe kind of opus and sonic driven and so that make that creates a world where then if everyone can access the best models maybe not in real time but but quite close then how you productize the models the workflow you build around how you handle distribution all of that becomes much much more important um and that's a big thing that we think about especially making consumer investments uh consumer is just so fickle and so hard to get a magical product and product that works and and that continues to be very very true in the AI era uh I should say for for audience I'm becoming aware that I should explain perplexity computer just maybe a little bit to say like it did three things that made it a little a little easier to access you know for and

35:49I'm sure what even what open AI is building with Peter Steinemberger they will um probably take this another level but one of the things you have to do if you want one of these AI agents is you have to hook it up to an API and now that's a very techy thing in itself and then you have to pay for tokens right for for that as well and one of the things because um perplexity computers only on their 250 their max um their their plan they're 200 to 250 dollar a month plan but they and you get like 10,000 credits essentially and then they gave people an extra 20,000 credits you know so that they could try this out but essentially they they obscured all of the like cost because people even are spending crazy amounts of money on token costs right now I've heard some people say they're spending more than what they set spend on an employee a developer to do to build the thing you know on some of the token costs which is wild but so they they they made that part you know um uh obscure to the user the other part was that you get it has 20 different models

36:51to your point so it it was automatically routing the models you know for you so for some queries it would send them to chat GPT especially things that were like high context for things that were more coding um related it was sending a lot of those to to anthropics models um and then it had some open source models and as well as sort of closed source frontier models but that model and actually it used Google especially for image models their image models right now are are so bananas yeah good way to describe it so it's um it was really interesting to see okay that they were doing this this sort of user you know layer to your point you know they really focused on the user interface side of it and made what was took something that was very technical and made it a little more accessible oh the last thing they did that I think was really interesting is if you use cloud code or replete yeah cursor codex all these tools and you get it to code you an app

37:53you stuff to deploy the app somewhere yes but lovable the one like unlock that lovable did is like you just code it and we'll just put it up on our server we'll deploy it for you right away and you can make something in five minutes and I could send the link to you and say say Olivia take a look at this thing you know that I just made well perplexity computer does that too so it will deploy the app or that you make right away it does the sort of a lovable thing so those are three what seem at the service maybe simple things hard to to do and just having those few unlocks it was all the sudden like whoa this all this looks like a you know a consumer version of what's very similar to open claw pretty quickly and that just impressed me that that happened so fast yeah I think perplexity made some great acquisitions and has acquired some like fantastic agentic builders okay and they have a really good consumer product sense like they were first really to the browser I think that's a great point about kind of abstracting away some of the complexity because it's interesting some of these products the better they are for developers the worse they are for

38:58consumers and vice versa like if you make a consumer select a model that they want to use for a generation they are going to turn like that is terrifying like they don't they don't know what any of these models mean like we in the tech world might obsess about them but like the average person doesn't want to make that decision they just want the product to work and I think something like a manus was an interesting kind of predecessor to like an open claw and I think a lot of people were surprised by how quickly manus exploded to hundreds of millions of in ARR but it really was the first kind of working consumer grade agent that could operate across products and get things done for you and I think we're going to see a lot more along those lines both from startups and from kind of the labs and the incumbents and we should imagine manus was bought by meta yes and so it's it's having its moment it's gotten some some positive publicity off of the open claw and perplexity computer there there were several people when I was

40:00tweeting about perplexity computer you know on x that were telling me like it's fine but manus is better like I had a number of those so it was it has its fans and it also was sort of was having a moment writing you know on this this wave of AI agent you know positive buzz too I'm glad you glad you surfaced that one yeah it's interesting because I think that like at this stage in AI there's a lot of like clawed versus Chatchy BT or like manus versus open claw and I think that makes sense if you assume that AI is kind of a limited market but my view as I said earlier is that everything is going to be AI in in 10 years and in that version of the world similar to how there's like so many massive billion dollar plus software companies now there's going to be it's like an industry not a market like there's opportunity for a massive amount of products that can each get millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of users and so I think a lot of what we're

41:01seeing right now is like head-to-head competition is more like there's room for a lot of things to exist yeah it's not zero some yes there's a better way to put it a lot of things to a lot of a flowers to bloom you know in this space yeah no that's a great point all right I want to talk a little bit about some new things that that you all have you have this list that that you do every year on the gen AI consumer apps and the the March 2026 version is here so why don't you talk to a little about what this list is you know how you started it and why your team clearly is very enthusiastic about it so we started it in 2023 at that time you know Chachi BT had been released people were maybe starting to use AI but it was very early and I think we were asking ourselves like as a consumer team how can we better understand what the mainstream person is picking up and using an AI and that's going to be that's a different question than like who has the most

42:07revenue from tech companies and power users things like that so we actually did something fairly simple which is just pull every website in the world unique traffic and then every mobile app in the world monthly active users and we go down each of those lists and grab the first 50 companies in each that are kind of AI native or now majority AI enabled like things at the beginning of the report like when we first started the report things like a notion or a canva would not make it on the list because they had a few AI features but they're not AI products now notion is reporting that 50% of new ARR is coming from their AI features so we've kind of evolved to the methodology of the list a little bit over time but I think it still gives a pretty good look at what's getting the most usage globally who on your team I assume it takes a whole team to work on this who on your team you know comes together to make the list honestly everyone we pull the data first

43:12and then you know here in adrison we have early stage teams we have growth teams that probably have even more you know sophisticated understanding of what's going on with later stage companies and in the public market so they contribute we have a lot of writers that help to make sure that whatever I am saying about the data analysis is actually you know intelligible to the mainstream consumer because I'm so deep in all of the AI and tech stuff but it's been a really rewarding and an extremely fun thing to work on I think you know consumer as an area of investment goes in and out of vogue a lot like there might be a few foundational consumer companies every couple years it's not like enterprise where you can kind of like almost brute force success yeah and so I think a lot of people don't pay a lot of attention to consumer or they're like I'm a consumer so I understand and so they don't think that deeply about it and you definitely don't want to overthink things and consumer software land but we also like we've noticed that

44:13looking at this data in a more granular way gives you kind of an interesting sense of how the average person thinks about AI very good now there were some top takeaways yes that you had from this we'd love to talk about a few of them the number one was that chat GPT is still in the lead of the the default AI you know app even with the events of the past week but but you also mentioned that but the race is on that there there are more companies you know in the report there are more there's more mind share being shared across the industry that's absolutely it it's it's um I think it was like a one horse race you know even a year ago like the only AI product that most people knew was chat GPT and we're seeing more products emerge and I think it's like I said before there's room for so many big companies and it's probably ultimately good for consumers to have companies and products that are specializing in building like the best in class

45:15version of a specific thing so I think we've seen chat GPT really really narrow in on like the mainstream user we've seen Claude and Anthropic really really narrow in on kind of technical users prosumers some enterprise stuff we've seen Gemini very much double down on creative tools to your point about nano banana and and VO those are kind of best in class on both the image and video front right now um and so I don't think it's like a winner take all necessarily I think that the level of value that these products are providing to people are such that they will probably multi-tenon and all of the platforms will be able to make you know good revenue whether it's ad revenue transaction revenue if it if in the future you're buying everything through chat GPT or direct subscription revenue global usage splintering by product as well talk a little bit about this insight yeah so I think we see kind of a real bifurcation in between like the US the

46:22rest of the world and then specifically Russia and China are their own thing okay I think US usage looks similar to most of the rest of the world in that you know chat GPT is number one Gemini's number two some countries will randomly have like a little more cloud usage or a little more perplexity usage and then China and Russia because they have so much so many sanctions and also like state sponsored like local players of their own I would say those are the two markets other than the US and and maybe Israel as well um where models are being developed that are kind of really globally competitive um so in China for example they they have the lowest rate of chat GPT and Gemini usage of any country it's only like 15 percent combined so they're using daoba which is a bite dance product which also makes TikTok they're using deep seek still like deep seek usage is falling off a cliff in the US but it's extremely popular in China they're using Kimi and Kwen and then Russia

47:22kind of mirrors China bit they're the number two deep seek user um okay and then have some some local players like giga chat and and Alice and others uh I think the other interesting finding from that global look that we took is we kind of for the first time like heat mapped what countries are using AI more and what countries are using AI less on a per capita basis um maybe not surprising a little surprising to me but we saw you know Singapore UAE Hong Kong South Korea coming at the very very top US is kind of like low upper group at number 20 and then some of these countries like Russia and China where there's more restrictions are closer to the bottom in the report I should say to one of the things I didn't mention these are the report is the top 100 Gen AI apps you know broadly and then these are insights you know from it in that um international look you did mention um despite you said deep seek is is uh sort of waning a bit in the US it's use but it is the one product that bridges the divide across uh you know China Russia US uh it

48:26sort of has some popularity in all of them yeah I think um yeah still has some usage in the US for sure um not as much as it maybe did six months ago but it's still significant and I think it really did break through with that kind of viral you know all press is good press even if it's bad press moment when it comes to consumer AI and then yeah it's I like to use jcbt in China like the number of steps you have to go through with like a VPN and everything else um I think for the average person especially since deep seek is still quite a good model it's just much easier to use that so I would expect that to continue another one was creative tools so there they are starting to also break through we're seeing more of them uh start to to have their moment you know and it's funny I've seen also some non-technical people talk to me you know recently about Suno about Sora about nano banana 11 labs you know like 11 reader from 11 labs and things like that that sort of

49:29surprised me like I thought of those tools as being pretty technical um as well but talk a little bit more about you know what you all saw from the creative tools standpoint um you know creative tools are are um it was really the first area where consumer AI was working like mid-journey came before chat sheet me to you which I think a lot of people don't remember at this point because you know you had to log into a discord server to use it and it was a really kind of dedicated and specific experience um I think when when we first launched this list image generators kind of dominated in creative tools uh in terms of independent uh products and that actually has reversed in the last few lists to the point that now um the kind of core model providers chat GPT Gemini in particular have built very very good image generation um and so you know most of what a consumer might want to generate or edit in terms of an AI image can be done in those interfaces and so you'll notice that the products that are image focused that still appear on our list like a

50:32mid-journey or an ideogram or something like that they're very aesthetically opinionated therefore more sophisticated workflows versus the kind of like one and done prompt image what we're seeing kind of rise in their place are um modalities that the core model companies are spending a little bit less time on um I would say voice like eleven labs is one music soono you do or two others that's a tough space because of copyright and everything so I think the labs are are maybe less inclined to fight that battle when they're also trying to build a GI um and then videos also fascinating because google and open AI have done a great job there and china can train on any data including copyrighted data and so we see this other kind of parallel ecosystem of you know cdance clang hyloo like many of the best in class video models are are coming out of there as well and and um so I think we've been excited about products where you can use many of the models in

51:34the same place things like a like a kria just because it seems unlikely that there's going to be like one video model or one image model the kind of rule them all very good well my last question and it's funny because part of this question is perfect for you even though it's the same one that I ask um everyone but you know the greatest compounder the greatest multiplier is time and so I like to ask what you know what is your best tip for kind of the ways you spend a time what you learned about you know optimizing your time you know whether it can be productivity or or other ways uh and then what's the AI tool that you've been using lately that you'd love to sort of share and and think other people you know might not know about and could could benefit from oh I love that question on the time perspective I think like AI is intimidating for a lot of people and again we're early in the sense that most of these products have some kind of set up time and set up costs and a lot of people might think oh it's just going to produce AI slop or it's going to sound like AI but I think especially in the last three four or five months like if you give

52:39these models examples of your past work whether that be images or writing or something else they can really give you very significant leverage and in doing work for you but that kind of sounds like you and it's natural to you and they can even push your thinking more I've written lots of blog posts now alongside chatchubt and clod and end up in a much better place than I think if I had kind of written it by myself um on the tool side there's there is so many I try to kind of immerse myself in the ecosystem I found myself making a lot of presentations lately um because I think it's kind of a great way to communicate information and it's also like valuable both synchronous and asynchronous um and so I think gamma has been one that I'm using a lot and that is a great example of a product that is consumer grade like you could you could give it to anyone off the shelf and they could use it so that's one that I would recommend Olivia thank you so much for your time thanks for being here thanks for having me the the day yeah you do you do you do