Howdy wizards,

Everyone can now follow which GenAI use cases companies are actually getting results from with my free tracker, built on thousands of real-world implementations.

Check it out.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI.

What were the top GenAI use cases for companies in Q1’26?

I’ve taken a look at the 420 GenAI case studies with quantified results published in Q1’26 (up from 343 YoY) to see if they reveal anything interesting.

They do.

The most overarching thing: companies are shifting from trying to build everything themselves (thus less case studies within product/engineering) to buying more ready-made AI products for specific workflows.

Companies are getting more deliberate about what they build, and there are more startups offering great tools for specific use cases.

Btw — one of these great tools I’m personally using every week and am a big fan of is Granola. Granola is also this week’s sponsor. This is your sign to try it:

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GRANOLA

”Wait, what did we decide?”

You know that feeling when you leave a meeting and immediately forget half of what you agreed to?

That's not a memory problem. When you're back-to-back all day, there's simply no time to process. No time to write the follow-up.

Granola helps you become the person who actually does what they said they'd do.

You take notes during the meeting. Just quick bullets, nothing formal. Granola transcribes in the background and turns those notes into clear summaries with actual next steps.

No more "wait, what did we decide?" moments. Just clarity. And follow-through.

Download Granola and try it on your next meeting →

Free month with the code WHATPLUGIN

TRENDS TRENDS TRENDS ❦ TRENDS TRENDS TRENDS

For sales the growth story is pretty clear.

The fastest growing use cases within sales are predictive analytics and lead qualification. They’re also among the use cases in the dataset with the highest proven impact.

Sales orgs are getting way more efficient by using AI to rank the pipeline, score deals, forecast churn, etc. They’re also increasingly using voice agents to qualify leads.

Vendors like Clay are having a good payday.

Sales sits close to the money, so it's an easy way for companies to show ROI on AI implementations — which in turn makes it easier to gain support for other AI initiatives.

The growth in HR is largely AI recruiters making the hiring process more efficient. A prominent example is companies doing high-volume hourly hiring (e.g. chain restaurants, retail, and hospitality), using tools like Workday's Paradox to text candidates to screen them and book interviews.

Legal departments are using law-specific LLMs like crazy. The biggest law firms on the planet (and the small ones too) are now drafting motions, summarizing depositions, and reviewing contracts with tools like Harvey, and doing eDiscovery with tools like Relativity.

The growth here has a lot to do with a specific industry: Healthcare. Think AI that listens to patient visits and drafts the notes. Companies like Abridge, MS Dragon Copilot and Oracle are some key players here.

When it comes to declining categories, I’ve covered product engineering already. That leaves Knowledge Management and Customer Service.

KM is moving away from the classic Enterprise Search (aka one big knowledge base to talk to your docs) to more specific use cases like Employee Support Assistant and Research Synthesis. Because Enterprise Search is a big use case within KM, it declines as this AI feature becomes table stakes (e.g. tools like Notion, Atlassian and Google Workspace now have this type of functionality built-in).

Customer Service is moving away from simple Q&A chatbots to more agentic AI that can actually resolve customer requests end-to-end, rather than just be annoying.

The classic FAQ-style AI chatbot is widely adopted, but isn’t newsworthy anymore, so there’s less case studies about these implementations. However, underneath the decline, agentic customer service and voice agents are growing strongly within customer service.

❦

I’ve seen more people sharing my newsletter with friends and colleagues lately and I’m incredibly thankful. It’s really the best way you can support my work.

The data behind this analysis came from Context Windows, the platform I built to track GenAI case studies. Want to see the full thing? Book a demo with me.

You are a delight.

Dario

Disclosure: To cover the cost of my email software and the time I spend writing this newsletter, I sometimes work with sponsors and may earn a commission if you buy something through a link in here. If you choose to click, subscribe, or buy through any of them, THANK YOU – it will make it possible for me to continue to do this.