The most beginner friendly AI there is right now, and still the best brainstorming partner I have ever had. If you have never really used any of this properly, start here and nowhere else. Fifty ideas in two minutes, and the conversation gets better the longer it goes. The image generator built into it is the best there is, and Custom GPTs are the part most people never touch: build one that knows your job and your style and it stops giving you generic answers forever.

If you want to bump it up a notch, this is the one. It is the smartest model I use and the only one that does not write like a robot, so everything I put out goes through it. Turn on Opus 5 for anything that actually matters. It is also not one product but four: Chat for talking, Cowork for doing the work, Code for building things, and Design for making them look good. Most people only ever find the first one.

The one to use if your whole life already runs on Google. It sits inside Gmail, Docs, Drive and Calendar and already knows where everything is, which beats a smarter model you have to copy and paste into. On its own though, it is a step behind the top two for me.

The one I open for what is happening right now, today. It is wired into X so it knows about a story hours before anything else does. For live news and settling an argument it is genuinely the best. For anything where being wrong matters, I would not rely on it.

People have stopped googling and started asking AI who to hire, what to buy and who to learn from. When they do, it names two or three and that is the whole list. There is no page two anymore. Cytd works on getting you to be one of those names. It is the most expensive thing on this page and in my opinion the one most worth it, and the check itself is free.

The one that actually runs your computer for you. Point it at something repetitive and it goes and does it, files and all. One thing that trips everyone up: Codex only lives inside the ChatGPT desktop app, not the website. Download the desktop app from the link, then toggle to Codex in the top left.

The one everyone sleeps on. It does not answer you, it goes and does the work. I set it off, close the laptop, come back to it finished.

Give it a job in plain English and it comes back with the finished thing rather than a conversation about the thing. Slides, documents, sheets, research, even video. Genuinely impressive when you want an output and not a chat.

Good for the longer multi-step jobs that need to run on their own for a while. More niche than the big two but it holds up.

Start here if you have never built anything. You describe the app and watch it appear in front of you, with a live link at the end. No terminal, no code, nothing to install. This site was built with it.

A step up from Lovable and considerably more powerful. It reads your whole project, writes the files, runs the tests and shows you its plan before it touches anything. Worth graduating to once you have built something and want it to be properly yours.

For people who already write code. It is the editor that gets out of your way. If you do not code, skip it and use the two above.

Hold one key and talk instead of typing, in any app on your machine. About three times faster and you never go back. Of everything on this page this is the one people thank me for most, and it takes two minutes to set up.

The best overall tool for both images and video, and the only creative subscription I would keep if I had to pick one. Every model in one place, real camera controls so your video does not look like everyone else's AI video, and it plugs straight into Claude so you can make a whole campaign without leaving the chat. My picks inside it: Nano Banana 2 and GPT Image 2 for images, Seedance 2.5 and Kling 3.0 for video. That is the model question answered.

The current image model inside ChatGPT, and the best there is at getting readable text into a picture, which is where most AI image tools fall apart. Nothing to install, it is already in the app you have.

The one for editing an image you already have rather than making a new one. Change the single thing that was wrong without regenerating everything and losing what worked.

The best clone of you specifically. Record yourself properly once and every video after that is your face, saying anything, in any language, without a camera.

The same idea but with a library of presenters rather than a clone of you, which is what you want for training videos, explainers and anything the company puts its name on instead of your face.

I would reach for this over Canva every time now. Prototypes, decks, posters, full marketing assets, all from a description, without opening a design tool at all.

I like Canva and I still use it, but the AI features bolted onto it are the weaker option now. If you have the choice, use Claude Design. Where Canva still wins is when you want to hand a template to someone else on your team.

Meta's official connector lets Claude build campaigns and tell you what is broken in plain English, without you opening Ads Manager. Pair it with Higgsfield for the creative and you have the whole thing in one place.

Where all my content starts, and the tool that changed my week more than anything else on this page. Drag in a video, an article or a voice note and it comes back as scripts, captions and posts on a canvas where you can see how everything connects. An hour of work becomes about ten minutes.

Chops your long videos into shorts automatically. Not clever, genuinely useful. Every long video you have ever made is sitting there as ten clips you never cut.

This is how you are reading this right now. Someone comments a word on a video and this sends the DM automatically. If you post content and you are not running it, every comment you get is a lead going in the bin.

Edit video by editing the transcript. Delete a sentence and the footage goes with it. Still one of the best ideas in editing and the fastest way to cut anything with talking in it.

Free, and the AI features in it are genuinely good now. Auto captions, background removal, reframing for vertical. If you are editing on a phone it is still the one.

Fifteen seconds of your voice and it can read anything out loud as you. This is the one I use for voice now and the quality genuinely surprised me.

Describe a song and get it back a minute later, vocals and all. Background tracks that would otherwise cost hundreds to license.

No bot joins your call. It listens through your computer and hands you clean notes and action items after. Invisible in the best way.

Fastest way to a deck that does not look like AI made it. Give it the topic and it builds the layouts, the images and the copy. I have not opened Google Slides in months.

Still the best place to actually organise your work, and the AI on top of it is decent now. Not exciting, genuinely useful.

Research with sources you can click and check. The big models have caught up for me, but the free tier is still worth having open in a tab.

Criminally good and completely free. Upload PDFs, documents, even YouTube videos and it becomes an expert on exactly that material and nothing else, so it cannot wander off and invent something. The audio overviews turn anything into a podcast you can listen to on a walk.

Where my newsletter lives and has since the start. Built for creators rather than for corporate marketing teams, so the automations make sense the first time you look at them. Free until a thousand subscribers, which is longer than most people think.

Pull the name, role and verified email of the exact decision maker at any company, straight out of a Claude chat.

Where the business banks. Not an AI tool in itself, but it connects into Claude so I can ask what came in this month and get a real answer instead of exporting a spreadsheet.

Heavy, but if you run a local service business it replaces about five other subscriptions. Overkill for one person, worth it the moment you have staff.

Connect the store to Claude and it writes the listings, pulls the numbers and tells you what is actually selling.

Keeps every application in one place and rewrites your CV against each job description, which is the part everybody skips and everybody should do.

Practise on camera against real questions and get feedback on your delivery, your filler words and your structure, plus actual coaching on what to say rather than just how you said it. A lot of universities and libraries give you it free, so check before you pay.

Run your own writing through it before you hand it in, so you know what a detector is going to say about work you actually wrote.

Ten finance agents built into Claude. Three of them do what analysts charge thousands for.

Contract review with redlines, NDA triage, compliance checks. Nine skills, all free to install.

Forty six free pro marketing skills you install in minutes. Copywriting, ads, SEO, email, pricing, a whole go-to-market team.

It reads your real sleep, steps and heart rate instead of guessing. Ten minute setup and it changes every health answer you get.

A hundred-odd blood markers a year with an AI that explains what they actually mean for you, and real clinicians behind it. The first thing I have seen that turns a blood test from a PDF you do not understand into something useful.

One Cowork project that remembers every card, point balance and preference, then does the maths on any trip and tells you the cheapest way to actually book it.