Sean’s AI Signal – Issue #17
Welcome to Signal! Every week I highlight 5 of the most useful ideas, tools, and conversations shaping AI right now. Think of it as your shortcut through the noise. Let’s dive in!
This week I am highlighting five of my favorite AI tools that are making our lives easier and providing leverage to individuals like never before. All five are game changers and I hope you try one or two of them yourself! I’d love to know what you think!
Signal #1: Cursor Just Redefined What “Fast” Means
The chart making the rounds this week says it all.
Cursor is exploding right now, and it’s worth understanding why. Cursor is an AI coding tool that replaces the entire developer workflow. Instead of jumping between GitHub, Copilot, StackOverflow, and Slack, Cursor pulls everything into one place and adds an AI partner that can write code, fix bugs, and refactor huge chunks of your codebase instantly. This means a single engineer can do the work of two or three. That’s why the adoption curve is vertical. One developer tries Cursor, sees immediate productivity gains, and then tells their entire team. There’s no training. No onboarding. It just works. And this is why Cursor is on pace to hit $1B in ARR faster than Slack, Figma, OpenAI, or any other software company in history.
Why It Matters: Cursor is the clearest signal yet that AI companies can grow on completely different timelines than the SaaS giants we’ve spent the last decade studying. The old playbooks don’t apply anymore. Value delivered in seconds creates a distribution engine that even the best SaaS products could never match. And Cursor shows how different the AI-native world is. When a tool helps someone do their actual job dramatically faster, adoption doesn’t trickle in, it floods in. This isn’t the old SaaS model where companies buy seats and roll it out over months. This is bottoms-up adoption powered by people who simply want to move faster. Cursor is the clearest example yet of a tool that gives people capability, not just software.
Signal 2: Lovable Shows a Level of Efficiency We’ve Never Seen Before
This chart made me stop.
It compares how much annual recurring revenue (ARR) each company generates per employee, and Cursor and Lovable are in a completely different league from everyone else. Cursor is at $6.1M per employee. Lovable is at $3.4M. For context, the well known software companies on this chart, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Atlassian, and Datadog, all sit around 500k per employee (still very impressive but nowhere near these AI native companies).
To understand why this is happening, it helps to know what Lovable actually does. It is a prime example of what they call “vibe coding.” Lovable started as an AI website builder, but it has quickly expanded into much more. You can use it to create new websites, landing pages, software prototypes, user flows, and early versions of new products. You describe what you want to build and Lovable generates the layout, the words, and the basic design. It takes an idea that might have been stuck in your head or in a notebook and turns it into something concrete you can share with someone else. When a single person can do the work that used to require a designer, a developer, a copywriter, and a project manager, the economics change. That is what this chart is showing. These companies are not incrementally more efficient. They are operating under an entirely different model. Lovable’s growth reflects that. People try it once, get something usable almost immediately, and then send it to others. It is spreading because the product gets you to a finished result with almost no friction.
Why It Matters: Lovable is one of my favorite tools to use right now because it helps me move fast. I use it to sketch new ideas, build early product concepts, mock up software features, create landing pages, new web sites and even explore new business ideas. It helps me bring ideas to life quickly, and that is the whole theme of this week’s issue. Lovable shows how creation is changing. One person with an idea and an AI system can now do the work of an entire team. This is not a small shift. It is the beginning of a new way of building products and companies.
Signal 3: Gamma Is Redefining How We Tell Stories at Work
Gamma announced a new funding round this week, and the numbers behind the company caught my attention. Check out this great post on X with the details and corresponding interview with Gamma co-founder Grant Lee:
https://x.com/lennysan/status/1989018996046451198
But first it helps to understand what Gamma actually is because it plays a slightly different role than Lovable even though they both are in the AI creation space. Gamma is built for storytelling. It is a modern replacement for PowerPoint that helps you explain ideas in a clean and engaging way. You start writing and Gamma turns your thoughts into something that looks polished. It handles the design, the flow, the formatting, and the look and feel. You focus on what you want to say and Gamma takes care of the rest.
Here is another way to think about it. Lovable helps you build things, while Gamma helps you communicate things.
Gamma is a fifty person company doing more than $100M in recurring revenue. They have been profitable for more than a year. They have more cash on hand than they have ever raised. All of this happened because people try the product once, create something that looks great, and then share it. That is the distribution loop. They call themselves the anti PowerPoint and that feels exactly right.
Why It Matters: At PeopleMetrics we have already started using Gamma and we love it. It is helping us move away from the dreaded deck with slide after slide that bore people and do nothing to inspire action. Gamma lets us tell stories from data in a way that feels alive. We can bring customer stories to life with modern design, motion, visuals, and actual human stories rather than burying insights in charts. Gamma helps us communicate insights in a way that is compelling, engaging, and hard to ignore.
And Gamma is not just relevant for insights companies like PeopleMetrics. Every company relies on storytelling. Every team needs to explain what they learned, what they recommend, and why it matters. For decades, the deck has been the default. Gamma is showing a different path. It removes the friction between the insight and the story. It helps people understand what you mean instead of fighting through a wall of slides. Gamma is not just a cool AI tool. It is a signal that the way we communicate in business is changing. And once you experience it, it becomes difficult to imagine going back.
Signal 4: Google Was Counted Out, But the Momentum Is Shifting
Last week I wrote about Google’s surprising push forward in AI. This week we have another data point that shows the momentum is real.
Similarweb released new traffic numbers for the major AI models, and Google’s Gemini continues to climb while many others are flat or declining. OpenAI is still the clear leader, but Google is the only company gaining meaningful share. Gemini is Google’s conversational AI model, their version of ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. You can chat with it, create content, analyze information, brainstorm ideas, and use it as an assistant the same way you would with the other well known models. The difference is that Google can integrate Gemini into every place you already spend time online. And that is the real advantage. Google controls the applications people use constantly. Search, Chrome, Gmail, Android, Maps, and YouTube. When they add Gemini directly into these core products, adoption does not happen slowly. It arrives all at once because it becomes the default for billions of people.
A year ago Gemini barely showed up on these charts. Today it has more traffic share than several other well known AI tools combined. And this is happening right as the rumored release of Gemini 3 approaches, likely this week. If the early reports are accurate, Gemini 3 will be the clear LLM winner (for now). The bigger story is how fast the narrative has changed. Twelve months ago the consensus was that Google missed its moment. Too slow. Too bureaucratic. Too cautious. Now they are shipping weekly updates, the model is improving quickly, and the usage numbers are finally starting to show it.
Why It Matters: Momentum in AI can change very quickly, and Google is proving that a company with massive distribution should never be underestimated. When Google executes, the entire ecosystem reacts. Gemini’s rise is a reminder that AI will not be a winner take all market. People will use different models for different needs. And if Gemini 3 is as good as people expect, Google may move from “catching up” to “leading” faster than anyone predicted. This is one of the most important storylines in AI right now because it shows how fast the landscape can shift. Stay tuned …
Signal 5: NotebookLM Might Be My Favorite New AI Tool
The last signal this week is NotebookLM, and it has quickly become my favorite new AI tool. NotebookLM is Google’s learning assistant. You upload the material you want to understand and it becomes an interactive guide that helps you make sense of it. It explains ideas in simple terms, helps you find patterns, and shows how everything connects. It stays grounded in the sources you gave it and responds in a way that feels clear and helpful.
Here is a great chart that outlines the different use cases for NotebookLM:
If you are a student and you are not using NotebookLM or something like it, you are already behind. It changes how fast you can learn and how deeply you can understand something. But it is not just for students. Anyone who wants to understand a topic quickly can benefit from it. Researchers, analysts, strategists, product teams, creators. Anyone who deals with information. What strikes me most is how natural the whole experience feels. You do not read passively. You have a conversation with the material. Complex content becomes manageable. Ideas you would normally skim past suddenly make sense. It feels like the way learning should work.
Why It Matters: NotebookLM fits perfectly with the theme of this week’s issue because it is another example of an AI tool that is genuinely changing the world. The use cases are endless. It helps you learn faster. It helps you think more clearly. And it gives you a way to bring ideas to life in a much more dynamic way. I can already see huge potential for insights work. NotebookLM can take information that would normally get buried in a long document and make it easier to explore, question, and understand. I will leave it there for now, but this is a tool I plan to use a lot more. It is one of the clearest glimpses of how AI is going to reshape how we learn, think, and communicate.
The Last Word: When the Work Stops Getting in the Way
If there is one theme running through all of these signals, it is that AI is finally helping people get things done. Not in theory. Not in the future. Today!
Cursor turns coding into a faster, smoother part of the process instead of something that slows you down.
Lovable helps you turn ideas into something real.
Gamma helps you tell a clear story without drowning in PowerPoint slides.
Google is putting AI into the tools people already use every day.
NotebookLM helps you understand complex material without getting overwhelmed.
None of this feels like software. It feels like momentum. It feels like removing the drag from work. It feels like giving people the ability to bring ideas and insights to life without all the friction that used to get in the way.
What stands out to me is how personal this shift is. These tools don’t require a big team or a big budget. They make one person way more effective. They make one person clearer. They make one person faster.
That is the real shift. The leverage has moved to the individual.
From someone in the insights industry, these tools give me hope. For years we watched insights get buried in decks and documents that nobody wanted to read. We watched good ideas lose their energy inside long reports. These new tools move in the opposite direction. They help insights come alive quickly. They make them easier to show, easier to explain, and easier for someone else to act on.
This week’s signals are not about the tools themselves. They are about the feeling you get when the work gets lighter and your ideas start moving again. That feeling is becoming the new baseline.
And we are just getting started! Let’s go!