There’s an AI tool for literally everything right now.
Want to track the calories and nutritional value of your dinner? Calorie Mama can do that with just a picture of your meal. Don’t know what to gift your sister in law for her birthday? Try Gift Ideas AI. Wish Seneca was here to answer all of your life’s questions? Ask Seneca got your back.
Then, it’s no surprise that we’re spoilt for choice in the market of AI productivity tools. The problem? Finding the good ones is as easy as hunting for a needle in a haystack.
The good news: I did the job for you and found the best AI tools to slash your work time (hopefully) in half.
Now, I know every knowledge worker is doing something different. But we’re all also doing a lot of the same things:
- Creating impactful and beautiful presentations
- Remembering what was said in important meetings
- Scaling social media management for ourselves (if not for clients)
- Managing our individual to-do list and company-wide projects
- Writing and managing a plethora of emails and Slack messages
- Trying to condense info we get from long reports and longer podcasts
So, I’ve broken down these 18 AI tools into these six categories.
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But first, ChatGPT
Now, ChatGPT’s premium version can do pretty much everything the other tools on this list can. I’ve used it to brainstorm social media ideas, refine presentation pointers, write product descriptions, and a lot more.
But what I’ve noticed is that it can do everything with mediocrity. Yes, it can read long whitepapers and share the takeaways in bullet pointers. But it adds information from other sources, making its output inaccurate and hard to trust. Compared to dedicated AI presentation tools, its results are subpar. The slides don’t look as on-brand as I’d like and the data visualization isn’t as neat. I could go on.
If all you can afford is the premium version of ChatGPT right now (aka ChatGPT Plus at $20/month), then go for it. But bit by bit, also start investing in dedicated AI tools for specific tasks. This will jump your efficiency and quality of work through the roof.
2 AI tools for creating impactful and beautiful presentations
Presentations are the backbone of many decisions in a company. But they can be tiresome to create. And, if you don’t have a knack for design, they can be a snooze fest. The two tools below will help you get a headstart in creating the content and the design of your next presentation.
1: Plus AI for creating presentations that require little to no tweaking
Plus AI is hands down one of the best tools to create presentations. Maybe I’m biased, but every other AI presentation maker I’ve tried has just led me from point A to point disappointment. Sometimes the output requires so many edits that I’d rather make the whole thing from scratch.
With Plus, the benefits are plenty. Top three?
- First: You can use it with PowerPoint and Google Slides as an add-on — no need to learn to use a whole new tool
- Second: Its slide editing capabilities are impeccable. You can prompt Plus AI natural language — whether you want to generate a new slide, rewrite a slide, or design a new theme
- Third: You can also add live snapshots of data into your slides. This is by far my favorite feature. Just add your data into it and Plus AI will update it automatically
And if you don’t want to start designing your presentation from scratch, Plus even has beautiful templates to help you hit the ground running.
Plus AI costs $20/month. There’s a seven-day free trial so you can test the tool.
2: Julius AI to generate sleek data visualizations
Anyone who has ever created a presentation knows the pain of visualizing data in a deck — especially if math and design aren’t your strong suits (like me 🙋♀️). Julius AI helps you create sleek designs of your data and even ask it for insights.
All you have to do is upload your data and ask Julius AI to visualize it using prompts such as “Show me a pie chart of employees by department.”
Julius AI is free for up to 15 messages per month. After that, the tool costs €40/month.
4 AI tools for scaling social media management
Social media has three components: generating ideas, managing a content calendar, and editing videos and photos.
I’m not focusing on the first two parts here because AI doesn’t necessarily need to tackle them. There are many AI-powered social media management tools, if you need them, but they won’t have strong photo and video editing chops. You need a dedicated tool for that. Here are four (with some alternatives).
1: Descript’s AI Underlord for editing your videos using your transcript
Look, I can edit words. But video? Can’t do a second-by-second edit of that to save my life.
But I still have to create neat-looking shareable clips for my clients sometimes. That’s when I use Descript. It lets you edit your videos using the transcript’s text. So what you edit in the transcript gets edited in the video.
Not just this: You can also improve your voice’s clarity, remove the retakes, cut filler words, and put the active speaker in the center of the camera. Descript’s AI Underlord is a godsend for people like me — who want to edit videos using words.
Descript’s free plan includes basic AI features. Paid plans begin at $12/month.
2: Klap for converting your long-form videos to shareable short-form video clips
If you have a YouTube channel or a podcast, you know how tedious it can be to create engaging social media clips from them. You need to shift to a vertical focus, add subtitles, etc.
Klap’s AI-powered model finds the viral-worthy moments in your long-form video and converts them into TikTok/Reel/Shorts clips. It’s not just repurposing; Klap scores each clip’s potential to go viral.
Klap also auto-reframes, provides various caption options, and customizes everything to your brand colors. The price is $29/month for ten 45-minute long videos generating 100 social media clips.
If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative, I like Cutlabs, but its user experience isn’t as smooth and the AI clipper ain’t that strong & intuitive.
3: Synthesia to convert your text into videos
AI avatars can be a hit-and-miss. But if you want to create videos for your company but don’t have the workforce, Synthesia’s AI powers can be magical.
All you have to do is create your script (if you want to convert a blog to a video, just enter the article’s URL) and click “Generate” to make a video. You can edit the AI avatars to be more inclusive to your brand, edit captions, switch layouts, etc. There are over 230 avatar options and you can also create your own.
You can use Synthesia to not just create social media videos but also videos for internal documentation, onboarding, and more. There’s a free plan with nine AI avatars and 36 minutes of videos per year. Paid plans begin at $29/month.
4: Photoroom AI to edit images
Photoroom is quite a popular name in the AI photo editing space. And for all the right reasons.
It is perfect for newbies and experts alike. You can change the background of your image, remove an object from your photo, add stickers & text to images, and even create AI images from scratch using prompts.
There’s also a mobile app for Photoroom that allows you to edit on the go. The free plan has limited AI features. Paid plans begin at $12.99/month.
Kittl is a better alternative for generating images, but Photoroom wins in the editing department. And if you just occasionally want to edit/remove the background from your photos, Removebg costs just €1.99 for one image and it goes even cheaper if you buy credits for more photos.
3 AI tools for remembering what was said in important meetings
Meetings are an unavoidable part of everyone’s job. You not only need to manage your calendar in these meetings, but also remember what was said, jot down meeting notes, and forward them to your colleagues who couldn’t make it (lucky). Here are three AI tools that make meetings more enjoyable:
1: read.ai for taking meeting notes and deriving insights from conversations
Read AI’s goal is to make your meetings and emails smarter. It doesn’t just generate simple meeting notes; it also highlights the sentiment in your meeting transcripts. This can help you gauge whether a customer was engaged in the conversation and what their overall feeling toward your product was.
There are plenty of other features that would make your meetings more enjoyable and efficient — like a 2-minute highlight reel of key discussion points in a meeting, tracking topics & action items from your meetings over time, and meeting analytics.
But my favorite feature is the ‘Speaker Coach.’ Read gives you personalized feedback by identifying trends across all your meetings. For example, if your Words Per Minute (WPM) is a bit too high for ideal comprehension, Read will flag it. Pretty cool, huh?
Read AI offers a free plan that includes basic reporting features and five meeting reports per month. Paid plans begin at $19.75/month.
2: Clockwise to find meeting times with your team
Clockwise is an AI-powered time management calendar — called Prism. It’s best for collaborating with your team members when you have shared calendars. You can chat with the tool to find time in your calendar, propose an empty time on your & your coworkers’ calendar, schedule tasks, share availability, and a lot more.
You can also copy your available times when communicating with external parties, navigate complex schedules of multiple people, and even add your to-do list tasks to find time for them in your day. It’s easily one of my top picks for the smartest AI tools.
There’s a free plan available with limited features. Paid plans begin at $6.75/month, billed annually. If you don’t work with a team, FlowSavvy or Hoop might be the better choice.
3: Rewind AI for capturing everything
Ever said, “Oh I remember seeing a LinkedIn post about that!” because same. Rewind AI sits in the background capturing everything you heard, scrolled, or said. (So remember to switch to incognito while using Netflix at 2 PM.)
It’s not a spy software…unless your boss asks for your data. You can compress and store literally everything you do on your screen — from meeting notes to X posts to old emails. Then you can ask Rewind AI’s chatbot whatever you want and it’ll bring that back from its memory.
The only thing Rewind AI can’t do is tell you where you kept your other sock. And that’s because it’s not on your screen. There’s a free plan with limited searching and asking capabilities. Paid plans start at $29/month.
3 AI tools for managing your individual to-do list and company-wide projects
We’re already swimming in productivity tools that have embedded their own AI. Notion has its AI and so does Asana and Trello. This list doesn’t include productivity tools that are already popular and have introduced AI tools to make themselves stronger. These are three separate AI productivity tools you can add to your stack:
1: Goblin.tools to break down a big project into sub-tasks
Goblin tools is an AI tool that can help you:
- Say difficult things professionally
- Estimate how long a task is going to take
- Break down big and complex tasks into small chunks
- …And other fun stuff
It’s not an advanced AI productivity tool with lots of fancy marketing behind it, but I’ve found it useful for breaking down a big project into various subtasks and giving myself a reality check about how long something is going to take.
Goblin tools is free to use. But if you need something more advanced, Hive Mind is also an excellent tool. Like Goblin tools, it can also break down your projects into various tasks so you know the next step to take. It can also create emails, content, blog outlines, etc.
2: Motion to have a productive schedule
Motion is like Clockwise on steroids. You can use it as a personal AI assistant and as a leader to monitor your team’s capacity.
Motion automatically time blocks your to-do list and meetings on your calendar, so you know your schedule every workday. It can also turn hundreds of tasks into a concrete plan.
I combine my work and personal calendars in it to see what my day looks like overall. Motion makes me feel prepared and in control. Plans start at $34/month.
3: Zapier to create workflows
Zapier needs no introduction. Want to get notified on Slack every time a lead fills out your form? Use Zapier to set up an automated workflow. Need to build complex workflows depending on various paths and triggers? Set it up in Zapier in no time.
Part of being a knowledge worker is doing the same tasks repeatedly. Zapier helps you automate those so you can spend more time doing more impactful tasks. And it’s only becoming smarter: You can now connect it to your favorite AI tool and summarize emails, analyze data, etc. much faster. It’s super easy to get started, but Zapier also has a library full of templates if you don’t want to begin from scratch.
Zapier is one of the easiest tools for automating processes and setting up solid systems within your workflow. There’s a free plan with unlimited Zaps but no multi-step Zaps. Paid plans begin at $29.99/month.
4 AI tools for writing and managing a plethora of emails and Slack messages
If you’re a knowledge worker, there’s a high chance you have to write a ton of emails every day. If you don’t have to write them, you have to read them. Here are four AI tools to write better emails and create a cleaner inbox:
1: MailMaestro for writing emails
MailMaestro is an AI email assistant that helps you write, sort, and track your emails. Their AI email writer is extremely versatile: You can choose the tone, length, and language you want, and the tool will create the draft for you.
My favorite is their new ‘AI personality’ feature that helps you write emails that sound uniquely you. You can train MailMaestro on words to avoid, preferred tone, job title, and whatever else you need. Instead of spending hours training GPT, you can use MailMaestro to do the job much more efficiently. The tool also has an in-built library of email templates.
There’s a free plan with a weekly limit of three requests. Paid plans begin at $15/seat/month. There’s also a 14-day free trial for all paid plans if you need it.
2: Type.ai for first drafts of everything
Type AI is an AI writing assistant that helps you speed up your writing process. You can choose the desired LLM model you want to work with and mimic the writing styles of your previous content so everything you write sounds more on-brand.
I still wouldn’t recommend using any AI writing tool to write complete drafts of blogs, social media posts, or even product descriptions. But you can use Type AI to get the ball rolling. Notably, the “rewrite” feature of Type AI is excellent for refining your existing drafts of all types of content. I also love that you can command the tool to edit your content by giving specific prompts.
The tool costs $29/month and has a 14-day free trial.
3: Grammarly for correct grammar
I’ve been paying for Grammarly’s premium subscription for nearly three years, and it’s worth every penny. It can help you catch grammar mistakes, suggest simpler sentence structures, and adjust to your brand voice.
Grammarly is integrated nearly everywhere I write — from Google Docs to emails to Slack. No more silly (and sometimes embarrassing) grammar mistakes.
A free plan would suffice for most people. But if you need those extra features, paid plans begin at $30/month.
4: Superhuman for email management
Superhuman AI is the epitome of email management AI tools. My favorite feature is that it matches the tone and voice of emails you’ve already sent and uses that as a reference point while writing emails based on your prompts.
You can also set reminders to follow up on emails, sort your emails in Split Inbox, collaborate with your team, and so much more. Using Superhuman will free you from that inbox dread.
There are many alternatives like SaneBox and MailButler, but none come close to Superhuman. Prices start at $30/month.
2 tools for trying to condense the info you get from long reports and longer podcasts
Long-form content is still a goldmine. But who has the time to read a 37-page whitepaper or listen to a one hour podcast? These two AI tools will help you get the gist of both of them without the heavy lifting:
1: Alice for transcribing
Most meeting assistants do the transcription for you, but what about when you need to transcribe a podcast or an interview? Enter: Alice.
It’s an AI-powered transcription tool that I’ve relied on for quite a while. It produces the most accurate transcripts in the fastest time.
It isn’t all fancy in the sense that it doesn’t analyze audience sentiment or create a brand dictionary for you. If you want those features, try Rev or Otter.
Alice gets the job done for the cheapest. The larger the plan you purchase, the more affordable the cost. For 100 hours, you can get each hour at just $2.99. If you want to buy just one hour, you must pay $9.99. Alice AI’s payment model is pay-as-you-go.
2: Coral AI for reading long documents faster
Coral AI helps you chat with your PDFs. You can ask the tool to summarize the doc, find specific information, and even get citations.
ChatGPT can do this, too, but it pollutes its answers with other sources from the internet. Coral AI sticks to the docs you provided it. Coral AI is free for up to two files. After that, the paid plan is $20/month.
ChatPDF might be a more affordable alternative if this need arises seldom for you. And AskTube and Otio do the same task for long videos. Ask these tools questions from the videos and get answers to them.
Do more of what you love using AI productivity tools
HubSpot’s recent study found that AI tools are helping marketers reduce manual jobs, focus on more important & enjoyable tasks, and be more productive.
Microsoft’s research confirms that AI has this effect across industries: Three out of four knowledge workers are using AI at work. And 93% of the AI power users say AI boosts their productivity; 92% say AI helps them focus on the most important jobs.
Staying aware, curious, and experimental with AI tools in the workplace can be immensely beneficial not just to your present efficiency but also to your long-term growth. Find the areas in your work life that would benefit most from AI’s intervention and start introducing new AI productivity tools.
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