An evening with AI agents

Quick observations from a Thursday night with AI agents and early signs of their "brand saliency."

Last night, with my daughters asleep and my wife away, I spent my evening with AI agents (not my typical Thursday night, I promise).

I started my evening working with Gemini and its deep research mode to help me understand a technical company and its market (pulling data from 96 websites simultaneously…) while taking breaks to explore bike reviews and other sports equipment on Perplexity. Claude was there too. My favourite AI critic, giving feedback on various questions, thoughts and ideas for future posts (not this one!). All this while my oldest and most loyal "AI companion," Spotify's smart radio mode, played in the background.

As AI permeates multiple aspects of our lives, we're naturally starting to associate specific products with particular use cases. Google/Gemini feels perfectly positioned for anything research and work-related – the combination of their productivity suite, rich data assets, and experience in indexing the world's information is finding its ultimate expression. Perplexity has carved out its "niche" in accessing real-world, up-to-date information – news, financial data, product or cultural reviews. Their RAG infrastructure pipeline combined with a simple UI really shines here. I don’t know whether that’s where they’re heading, but they feel well-placed to become a key gateway into online commerce.

Then there's Claude, which interestingly wins not through data assets but something more intangible, its tone and personality. I'm using Claude as my digital alter ego, asking it to critique my work and those of its AI competitors like the output of Gemini's research. After playing around with multiple Claude projects in the last couple of weeks (thanks

Hugo Amsellem

for the tips!), I've noticed how the context and instructions accumulate into something quite personal.

As people continue to interrogate what makes moats in AI, brand remains one of the oldest and most powerful ones. While it undoubtedly remains the blockbuster brand in the space right now, it's worth noting that, throughout the evening, I never naturally reached out to ChatGPT. Brand awareness is massively valuable but things can evolve quickly, as we've watched the incredible rise of Deepseek in the past week. That's why I think underneath the brand, it's worth thinking about the more nuanced idea of brand saliency – the instinctive association between a brand and a specific need. Brand saliency emerges through the best product for a job to be done. Something startups are ideally placed to execute, and as AI continues to do more work for us, there are plenty of these opportunities to capture.

I would love to hear which AI agents people instinctively turn to and for what. Please share!