If your business isn’t embracing AI you are leaving money on the table. We cover the best AI tools for business this year to help you boost productivity and avoid being left behind. This list highlights a range of AI products that can help save time and money regardless of which department you’re in.
Methodology for Selecting the Best AI Tools for Business
We are in the early stages of AI and finding out what it can do for business. There have been a number of predictions that it will usher in new levels of productivity across white collar and blue-collar jobs. In the following list we highlight a range of products and services that can help you complete tasks faster, and more efficiently with the help of AI.
Our primary goal is to identify AI services that actually help you complete or automate tasks allowing you to immediately or very quickly realize a return on investment.
Let’s jump in!
1. Zapier
Zapier is a process automation platform for business that uses AI to convert a description of a process automation into an automated process. Zapier has been a leader in the low-code process automation space for years and now its even better.
Automations can either be scheduled to start at a specific time, or start dynamically when an event occurs. Common events might be receiving an e-mail with a specific subject line or a file being updated on Google Drive, There are hundreds of integrations available and the options are nearly endless.
Users build workflows or Zaps that are started based on triggers or events. Previously, business users would manually add steps manually to setup an automation. Now that Zapier is powered by AI, you can describe a process and Zapier will generate the workflow for you.
Zapier also lets people connect directly to ChatGPT as part of their workflow and Zapier makes it incredibly easy to integrate ChatGPT into your own custom workflow.
In addition to being able to create AI powered workflows, Zapier is also investing in capabilities to let people build their own custom applications and is hard at work on building out a low-code database solution that integrates with thousands of applications to take on Airtable.
2. Microsoft Power Automate and AI Builder
Power Automate in many ways is Microsoft’s version of Zapier. It allows you to convert natural language requests into process flows. However, there are a few key differentiators that make Power Automate worth consideration.
Some of the reasons we like Power Automate so much is that it is highly flexible and can be deployed in small, medium, and large businesses.
- Ability to Automate Cloud or Desktop Processes – While Zapier is mostly a cloud based tool, Power Automate Desktop can interact with and automate Windows desktop processes.
- AI Builder Add-on for common AI Tasks – AI Builder is a low code way to do common tasks like, Convert PDF to Text, Extract Custom Information from Documents, Summarize Large Documents, and many other common time-consuming tasks.
- Exception Handling Interface – No AI models are 100% accurate, when there is a low confidence of accuracy, you can route an exception a human to validate and correct the except further training the model.
- Approval Flows – Power Automate has built in functionality to route documents or requests for approvals using Microsoft Office Account information.
In many cases, companies that already use Microsoft Enterprise accounts have access to the cloud version of Power Automate included in their licensing or can download Power Automate Desktop for free to get started!
3. ChatGPT Plus
Any company serious about using AI should seriously consider investing in ChatGPT Plus subscriptions for their employees. ChatGPT exploded in popularity in 2023. We won’t spend a lot of time of time covering it, but want to give it a nod as it is one of the most revolutionary AI tools the public can use today.
ChatGPT Plus is a great technical resource for anybody in your business across a range of departments from payroll, financial analysis, and even supply chain management.
ChatGPT Plus continues to improve. It has the ability to let users upload Excel documents or PDF files and ChatGPT can answer questions about the text within a PDF or make changes to the Excel file on command through their Advanced Data Analysis feature.
The AI chat bot continues to improve with new features being added seemingly monthly. There is even an enterprise version that lets you segregate your data from the overall ChatGPT data model.
4. Google Bard and Google Workspace
Google Bard is one of the closest competitors to ChatGPT available to date. Google has been aggressively integrating Bard Technology into its Google Workspace line of products, which include Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Meet.
The following video shows Google’s vision of Google Workspace powered by AI which will be coming soon to a wider audience.
We expect the feature set of Google Workspace and AI will continue to improve over time. In our testing we have found that Google Bard underperforms compared to ChatGPT at the moment but has made huge strides in recent months. It will likely hit parity in the near future.
Google Workspace has the added benefit of being a very affordable suite of workplace productivity tools. The AI add-on for Google workspace is anticipated to be an additional per month per user fee but if you’re part of the Google ecosystem already or looking for an affordable alternative to Microsoft Office it’s worth a look.
5.) Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft invested over $10 billion in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Since then they have been one of the most aggressive adopters of AI by integrating it into a majority of their products. Their flagship AI product is called Microsoft Copilot 365.
Microsoft is also adding Copilot features beyond the Microsoft Office Suite and adding them to the entire Power Platform, which is a line of business productivity products that include Power BI for business intelligence reporting, Power Apps for low code business applications, Power Automate for process automation or RPA, and Power Virtual Agents a low code chat bot and customer service platform.
Initial pricing for Copilot 365 was announced at $30 USD per user per month in addition to an Office 365 Enterprise license. For business users who rely on the Microsoft Office platform, there should be more than enough of a productivity boost to offset the added cost of a built in AI assistant.
6. AdCreative.ai
AdCreative.ai is a unique tool in that it’s one of the few AI generation tools available that will fully generate advertising campaigns for you.
It uses advanced AI to suggest tag lines based on prompts, and then will both suggest images to go along with it and present you with a number of potential graphic layouts. It really makes advertising easy and cuts down on the amount of time that a business has to spend going back and forth with graphic designers.
AI is capable of creating dozens of options in different image sizes that let you pick and choose the ones that will fit the best for your business. When combining AI graphics and text generation the tool becomes even more powerful. We see it being especially useful for people running small to mid-sized businesses who do not have the time or resources for a full-time ad agency.
7.) Jasper.AI
Jasper combines text generation and image generation into a single product targeted at business users. It has a wider range of use cases than some of the more niche products on this list. Because it is an enterprise first product, it can be setup with presets for brand voice, and on brand images.
It’s an all-in-one content creation tool powered by AI. Whether you let AI do all of the content creation itself or use it as a sidekick, it can enable you to generate better content and more content in the same period of time.
While there are other services on this list that perform similar functions, Jasper is unique in that it combines text and image creation into a single place and has support for enterprise accounts with multiple users and can keep separate voices and styles for different campaigns or product lines.
8.) Notion AI
Notion has been around for a while as a productivity and application that helps users keep their daily businesses activities or lives outside of work well organized. You may have heard of other collaboration and task organization tools like Monday.com or Asana, but Notion adds in an AI twist to make it unique from its competitors.
There are a lot of use cases for Notion AI, but some of the more interesting ones are using AI to organize your day, or summarize notes that may be jumbled and disorganized.
Notion has some features that go beyond task management and actually lets you use AI to help your writing, generate new ideas, make writing more concise. There are many different planning and task management solutions on the market but Notion is one of the few that will actually help you accomplish your tasks faster using AI.
9. Browse.AI
Browse.AI is more of a niche product, but can be highly useful in specific use cases. Browse.AI is an AI powered web scraping tool. If you’re unfamiliar with web scraping, its a process of setting up a script or a bot to visit websites and systematically download information from them.
Web scraping is incredibly useful for businesses if you want to identify key competitor websites to automatically track pricing changes over time, aggregate news, monitor social media platforms for sentiment analysis or keywords, the use cases are almost endless.
For businesses and marketing departments that are continuously looking at competitors or social media posts for information on what’s new or what’s changed, Browse AI will let you complete these otherwise mundane or impossible tasks with minimal effort.
It’s important to point out that web scraping with Browse AI has different levels of success based on how a website is structured. We recommend trying it on some competitor sites and giving it a try for yourself. Once the information is scraped, you can easily download it for further analysis.
10. Midjourney AI Image Generator
Midjourney and other AI art generators convert a text description of a scene into photo realistic art. A number of services but not all, generate royalty free images that are approved for commercial use. The service is incredibly useful for businesses that need to quickly prototype ad campaigns, or need to generate art quickly that would otherwise take weeks to come back from an outside artist.
The only limitation to the images AI can generate is your imagination. Social media posts, flyers, and web content creation will go infinitely faster compared to searching through libraries of stock images.
Some AI image generation services are also geared specifically towards business users, and let you create your own image generation style guide to ensure that images created are on brand and match your brand identity.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our list of top AI business tools on the market today. We tried to highlight a wide range of products that will help you automate business processes, or maybe introduce new ideas of things that you are not currently doing but could be doing with the help of AI assistantce.
To recap our list, we have:
- Zapier – Cloud Process Automation
- Power Automate – Cloud and Desktop Automation with AI Document Processing Capabilities
- ChatGPT Plus – A highly versatile AI chat bot and data analysis tool
- Google Workspaces – An affordable AI powered office suite
- Microsoft Copilot – The original office productivity suite with advanced AI capabilities
- AdCreative.AI – A combination of AI image and text generation for advertisements
- Jasper.AI – An enterprise friendly tool for content creators, bloggers, and other campaigns
- Notion AI – An office productivity and task management tool with AI features
- Browse.AI – Automated no code web scraping technology that uses AI for automated competitor analysis.
- Midjourney – A premium AI image generator for content creation that’s commercial use friendly.
There are no doubts that we are in the early stages of an AI productivity revolution. We highly recommend readers embrace these new technologies and start testing them out. Many services listed offer free introductory trials where you can see which ones could be a great fit for your business!