This episode reveals the personal AI productivity stack of an A16Z venture partner, offering a ground-level view of the specialized tools gaining traction over generalist models for high-value professional workflows.
Introduction to the 2025 AI Productivity Stack
Olivia Moore, a partner on the AI investment team at Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), shares the ten core AI products she uses weekly to enhance her productivity. Drawing from her experience testing dozens of new AI tools each week, her curated stack provides a practical guide to the applications that are delivering tangible value today, offering a roadmap for investors and researchers tracking the evolution from generalist chatbots to specialized, workflow-integrated solutions.
1. Comet: The AI-Native Browser and Workflow Hub
- Comet, developed by Perplexity, functions as Olivia's default browser, but its core value lies in its integration with G Suite for email and calendar management. This allows users to schedule meetings, sort emails, and even send replies directly from the browser interface, centralizing common tasks.
- Key Functionality: Olivia highlights Comet's "shortcuts," which are saved prompts that can be executed on any webpage. This transforms the browser into an automation tool for tasks like drafting custom outreach messages or saving LinkedIn profiles for automated processing.
- Strategic Insight: Comet represents a shift where AI is not just a destination but an integrated layer over existing web applications. For investors, its model suggests a future where browsers evolve into personalized operating systems for work, creating a powerful new entry point for AI services.
- Availability: Currently waitlist-only, with access granted to Perplexity Max subscribers ($200/month).
2. Julius: Specialized AI for Data Analysis
- Olivia positions Julius as a superior alternative to general-purpose models like ChatGPT for data analysis tasks. While large language models can falter with complex data files, Julius provides a more reliable and iterative environment for processing data, generating graphics, and creating downloadable outputs.
- Use Case: Olivia demonstrates uploading inflation data and using natural language to command Julius to "plot it and find the 12-month period with the most variance."
- Technical Feature: Julius supports notebooks, which are saved, repeatable analysis processes. This is critical for recurring tasks, such as daily analysis of customer acquisition channels, and allows for template-based graphic generation.
- Actionable Insight: The emergence of specialized tools like Julius indicates a market fragmentation where vertical-specific AI solutions can outperform horizontal giants on reliability and workflow integration. Investors should watch for tools that solve a specific, high-friction enterprise problem better than a generalist model.
- Availability: Free tier for up to 15 messages/month; paid plans start at $20/month.
3. Happenstance: AI-Powered Professional Network Search
- Happenstance is framed as the "AI-native LinkedIn," designed to solve the limitations of traditional professional network search. It aggregates connections from LinkedIn, Gmail, and Twitter, allowing users to run complex, natural language queries that are impossible on existing platforms.
- Key Differentiator: Olivia notes, "You could not do this on LinkedIn, but Happenstance converts your question into search terms that make sense and then it scores and ranks every result accordingly." An example query is: "engineers in SF with 5 years of experience who have worked at an early stage startup."
- Strategic Implication: Happenstance's strategy is a direct challenge to the data moats of established networks. By building a superior search and discovery layer on top of existing data, it demonstrates how AI can unlock value and potentially disrupt incumbents without needing to rebuild the underlying network from scratch.
- Availability: Free with a paid tier ($24/month) for unlimited searches and exports.
4. Granola: The Discreet AI Meeting Assistant
- While the AI note-taker market is crowded, Olivia identifies Granola's key innovation: it operates without a visible bot in the meeting, enhancing user comfort and privacy. Running as a desktop or mobile app, it combines manual notes with AI-generated summaries, real-time transcripts, and suggested questions.
- Advanced Features: Granola allows users to categorize meetings into folders for cross-meeting analysis (e.g., "ask Granola which of all the candidates are located in New York.")
- Integration Power: Its connection to Zapier, an online automation tool that connects different apps and services, enables complex workflows. For example, a meeting with a Y Combinator company can automatically trigger a ChatGPT summary that is then added to a shared Google Doc.
- Investor Takeaway: In a commoditized space, user experience (discreet operation) and deep workflow integration (Zapier) are powerful differentiators. Granola's success highlights the importance of moving beyond basic transcription to become an intelligent, connected hub for meeting data.
- Availability: Free trial for 25 meetings; paid plans start at $18/month.
5. Gamma: AI-Native Document and Presentation Creator
- Gamma is presented as a unified replacement for Google Slides and Docs, designed to generate and refine visual and written content. It helps solve the "blank page problem" by creating entire presentations from a single prompt, but Olivia emphasizes its strength as a "creative co-pilot" for refining existing ideas.
- Editing with AI: Gamma features an AI-powered editor that allows for natural language commands like "make this more concise" or "add another column of information here."
- Flexible Format: A key advantage is its departure from rigid slide structures, allowing for interactive elements like drop-downs and variable slide sizes within a single presentation.
- Market Trend: Gamma exemplifies the move toward AI-native creation tools that are not constrained by legacy formats. For researchers, this signals a shift in how information will be structured and consumed, blending the linear nature of documents with the visual, modular format of presentations.
- Availability: Free tier with plus plans starting at $10/month.
6. Willow: Voice Dictation with AI Editing
- Willow advances voice dictation beyond simple transcription by enabling users to edit text using voice commands. This creates a more fluid, hands-free writing and editing workflow.
- Core Functionality: Olivia explains, "I can read aloud a list and then tell Willow to format it into bullet points and it'll make that change retroactively."
- Workflow Integration: As a desktop app, Willow can be triggered with a hotkey to drop dictated text directly into any application, including email, Slack, or a web browser. It also learns from user edits to adapt to their personal writing style.
- Strategic Insight: The combination of high-accuracy dictation and voice-based editing makes voice a more viable primary input method for professional work. This trend could reshape user interfaces and create opportunities for hardware and software that prioritize voice interaction.
- Availability: Free plan for 2,000 words/month; unlimited plan for $12/month.
7. Superhuman: Augmenting a Power-User Tool with AI
- Superhuman, an email client known for its speed and keyboard shortcuts, is highlighted for its successful integration of AI features. This demonstrates how established productivity tools are adapting to the AI era to retain their user base and enhance their core value proposition.
- AI-Powered Features: Olivia's favorite new features include auto-labeling of messages, a split inbox, instant replies, and auto-reminders that resurface unanswered important emails.
- Investor Perspective: Superhuman's evolution is a case study in defensive AI integration. Rather than being disrupted, it has leveraged AI to augment its existing strengths, a strategy that other established software companies may need to adopt to remain competitive.
- Availability: $30/month or $300/year.
8. Overlap: AI-Powered Video Clipping and Social Automation
- For video content creators, Overlap automates the time-consuming process of finding and packaging engaging moments from long-form content. The tool analyzes a video, scores clips for engagement potential, and turns them into social-ready short-form videos.
- Advanced Automation: Overlap handles caption styling, post scheduling, and can even mimic a creator's tone from past posts, saving significant manual editing time.
- Strategic Implication: This tool automates a high-value creative and marketing function. For investors, it points to a growing market for AI solutions that increase content velocity and ROI for the creator economy and corporate marketing teams.
- Availability: Plans start at $20/month for solo creators, with team and enterprise tiers available.
9. Crea: A Multi-Modal Hub for AI Content Generation
- Olivia uses Crea for nearly all her AI-generated content, positioning it as a hub that integrates best-in-class models for images, video, lip-sync, and animation in one place. Its strength lies in its smart workflow tools that allow for easy iteration.
- Personalization with LoRAs: Olivia mentions training LoRAs (Low-Rank Adaptation)—a technique for efficiently fine-tuning large AI models on specific concepts—on herself and her colleagues. This enables the generation of hyperrealistic, personalized content with ease.
- Investor Takeaway: Crea's "hub" model suggests the future of AI content creation is not about a single "god model" but about a unified platform that allows users to chain specialized models together in a seamless workflow. The ability to easily personalize models with techniques like LoRAs is a critical feature for professional and creative use cases.
- Availability: Free plan to test models; pro plans start at $8/month.
10. ChatGPT: The Foundational Tool for Deep Research
- Despite the rise of specialized tools, ChatGPT remains a cornerstone of Olivia's stack, particularly for deep market research. She is a heavy user of the GPT-4o model for its image capabilities and reasoning.
- Critical Analysis: Olivia provides a balanced view, expressing disappointment with the performance of its newer agent and connector features. "I've been a bit disappointed that their new agent and connectors don't work as well as I've hoped," she states, highlighting a key weakness.
- Strategic Insight: Even the market leader has vulnerabilities. The unreliability of its agentic workflows creates a significant opening for more specialized and reliable tools like Julius (for data analysis) and Comet (for browser-based automation) to capture high-value, specific use cases.
- Availability: Pro plan mentioned is $20/month, with a higher-tier team plan also available.
Conclusion: The Rise of the Specialized AI Stack
This review of a power-user's AI toolkit reveals a clear market trend: the shift from relying on a single, generalist model to curating a stack of specialized, workflow-integrated tools. For Crypto AI investors and researchers, the key is to identify platforms with strong integration capabilities and unique data advantages.
