7 New AI tools I use daily as a Product Manager
Lots of AI "fart apps" out there. These are the ones I'm actually using every day, plus a few honorable mentions.
I thought it might be useful to share on more specific topics more regularly. Going a teeny, tiny bit deeper on a couple of subjects instead of super wide all the time. Hope it’s useful! Subscribe if you’d like to see more:
I get asked pretty often which AI tools I’m actually using these days. Probably because there are a lot of AI “fart apps” out there, i.e. apps just using AI for marketing/getting funding/to be cool but their approach is not actually useful.
I’m not going to name names 👀 instead I think it’d be more useful and frankly, more fun 🤩 to talk about the AI products that I not only absolutely love, but use for actually useful stuff everyday.
One more thing before we get into the goods…this is about NEW products. Products that were not really here without AI and LLMs specifically. I’m not including things like Google Photos, Spotify, etc. that always have been and continue to be amazing. Still using them, not alternatives YET. 👀
So here we go, as of May 2025, here are the products I’m using daily at this point:
ChatGPT: My creativity partner
DUH NO SHIT AJAY, so is everyone. Over 400 million users agree that ChatGPT is the bomb.com, it’s true.
Something interesting though is that most people still use ChatGPT as a search engine mostly. ChatGPT has made this use case better with SearchGPT. But I honestly don’t think it’s the best for that. It gets really buggy and isn’t as rich as our next product.
The features I really love with ChatGPT though are:
Image generation. HOLY MOLY, there’s really nothing like it.
Advanced Voice Mode. I have yet to find a better AI voice assistant. I will talk to it while I’m driving or on walks sometimes. It’s really incredible.
Brainstorming writing. Honestly, I’ve found the writing output to be unusable for things like this. But I DO use it for brainstorming and to check if there are any gaps in how I’m planning on talking about something. Great for that.
The use cases I find myself using it for the most are:
Generating images for short films I’m trying out or just for fun from family pictures
Brainstorming creative writing for this newsletter, emails, texts if they’re going to be long and detailed
I’ve used to help me search big documents and images. Pop in the PDF, and you can ask it questions about the PDF LLM style.
Advanced Voice Mode for job interviewing, one of my favorite use cases. Give it a Linkedin profile of the person interviewing you, along with any notes. You can mock interview and practice responding to a live person, along with feedback at the end on how to improve. And you can do it whenever you want. Amazing.
Now let’s talk about why I don’t use ChatGPT for search.
Perplexity: Epic for research, search
The undisputed champion of search in the AI era is Perplexity.
First of all, the design is gorgeous. Minimal but modern and just well-thought in all the best ways. They did hire one of my favorite designers to work with, so I’m not surprised. 😃
What keeps me coming back though is:
I don’t get ads, and for a subscription price that’s totally worth it I can search agentically as much as I want. I hate ads.
On Google, I have to go Search → Search → Search → Click → Back to search → Click before I’m happy. On Perplexity since it’s agentic, I go Search → AI agentic search does all of the wandering around → Click and I’m done. So much faster and less random wandering.
Up to date information by default. Sorry ChatGPT, but it’s stupid that I have to click on “Search” if I want the latest info. Perplexity does this by default. It’s 2025. I know they’re working on it, but ChatGPT should know I want the latest info by default.
Anyway, the use cases that Perplexity now has from me are:
PRODUCT RESEARCH, this is the killer app. I save hours with Research from Perplexity, getting it to help me research ideas for features I’m working on, improvements to the UX I’m thinking about that others have tried. It’s saved me hours of time wandering around the internet.
Pretty much any search that comes to mind goes to Perplexity at this point.
Sports scores, hallelujah!
Surfing the news, personalized for me without all the damn ads Google lets through
Perplexity changed my life. Speaking of life…
Cal AI: Shed fat the simple way
This is a recent change, but Cal AI is a pretty great nutrition app.
Oura Ring’s meal logging would take the cake 🍰 but I just can’t get any calorie tracking out of that. And unfortunately calorie tracking matters for my body for losing fat (oh how I wish it didn’t 😅)
Cal AI mashes together the photo logging + GPT-4o image features with calorie and macro tracking which is just easy. I take a photo, GPT-4o image analysis does a great job. I tested this out on ChatGPT and it was great but there was nowhere to store it before…now there is! Thanks Cal AI.
Someday I hope to not do meal logging anymore. But for now, Cal AI makes it pretty seamless. Now let’s talk about something completely different!
Runway: Testing out creative video with AI
So I tried Sora for a fun idea I had for a video and the level of slop I got out was astonishing:
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I started poking around the internet for ideas on how I could do what I wanted to do and came across this overview on Sora with Kling/Runway:
Kling was used for that viral Studio Ghibli LOTR video that made the rounds. I liked Runway a bit more, but the general gist is you can make short films with AI and it’s magic.
I’m trying to work out a short film with it, so far it’s incredible. I’m looking forward to sharing what comes out of it!
Lovable: I LOVE it for prototyping
This product needs no introduction. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve heard of the startup rocket ship that is Lovable.
Cursor and OpenAI’s new baby Windsurf are amazing, no doubt. But it’s just so fun to fire up an IDE in your browser and make cool shit. I talked about this last week in the newsletter, it took 20 minutes and a few prompts to create a new site on Lovable. It’s just the best and so smooth. Anytime I have an idea about something I want to do, I use Lovable by default. It’s just fun.
Granola: Actually pay attention during calls
Coming back to the list of things that save me hours of time, one of the best things on that list is Granola. OMG.
What a LIFESAVER. It listens to your system audio (with your permission of course) transcribes on your machine, and then runs it through an LLM to create perfectly crafted notes so you don’t have to type jack shit during your meetings.
Who the f is taking notes during their meetings anymore?? WHY?! Back when I was managing people I was like yo don’t bother, just download Granola and use that. Waste of time to take notes for real. Granola is the best.
Matic Robots: The robotics revolution is here
Listen, I didn’t plan to get excited about a robot vacuum. My iRobot was fine, even though I almost never used it and had to turn it off because it was loud and annoying about getting stuck all the time. 😅 Well folks, the AI revolution has given us a miracle in Matic Robotics.
This thing literally mapped my whole house with color imagery, identified all of the rooms, the materials on the floor 🤯🤯🤯 and cleans the house in a snap, missing toys and people and dogs. It’s incredible, I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s probably not possible without next generation AI. I watch it tackle my house in awe.
Honorable Mentions
Claude: Testing it out for work
Claude seems to slowly be taking over for work tasks. I had heard it’s better for work, in particular writing and coding tasks.
I’ve been wanting to try it out but just couldn’t figure out a great use case for it until recently I noticed that it doesn’t train on your data like Gemini.
Gemini can do less than Claude can, which is why I’m test driving it. But I do think this is going to be an issue for OpenAI going forward. If they continue to train on data, people are going to be less inclined to use it for work.
Anyway, giving it a go, will report back on how it goes!
Oura Ring: Advisor insights are getting good…
I love my Oura Ring. I check the app every day, multiple times a day. It’s for SURE in the category of products that weren’t enabled by LLMs, but inherently was best in class at ML and data-driven experiences.
They recently shipped Advisor. I was a beta tester for it, it was pretty rudimentary when I started with it. But lately it’s been giving me some banger insights and I am here for it.
One of the ones I got recently is the decline in my resting heart rate push notification as a result of more sauna time, walks and Zone 2 training. The notification caught me by surprise and was fantastic. Definitely a product I’m paying more attention to (as if I wasn’t in their app every hour already 🤣)
Reflect: My Notes Daily Driver, iterating on an AI first strategy
AI for notes is not a new concept, but Reflect is really infusing OpenAI and Anthropic into their notes app in a way that’s unique compared to Notion and others and I am here for it.
It’s native to the app, which is much smoother than Apple Notes. And I find the functionality less complicated than Notion, along with task management just being easier to do. Highly recommend if you’re looking for a Notes daily driver with AI.
Did I miss any new AI tools that you love? Leave me a comment. I’m always looking for great stuff! And don’t forget to subscribe if you enjoyed this and would like to read more:
Hope you got some new stuff to try out of this list! 🚀