AI tools every innovator should be using

AI has leveled the playing field. While you never needed a huge team to run a basic website, harnessing AI can help you achieve things that were previously out of reach (unless you spent thousands).

But there’s a problem. New AI companies are popping up faster than ads on TikTok. Should you spend hours testing each and every one? Find three or four you like and stick to those? Or forget trying something new, and simply upgrade your go-to GPT to Premium? 

There is another way. Keep reading, as we take a closer look at what’s really going on and uncover which AI tools can really help creatives and innovators who are developing an online presence for the first time.

Types of AI

First, let’s break AI down into its types. It will make it easier to differentiate between them.

Large Language Models

These are our bread and butter — the “shoulders of giants” upon which everything else stands. ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Copilot: These are essentially Swiss-army knives. They’re trained on such vast quantities of text that they’re able to understand language and generate accurate responses by pattern-matching (or something). It all sounds logical enough, but under the hood, it’s really just magic.

The upshot is that they use their magic to answer our questions authoritatively (sometimes too authoritatively) on just about any subject. It makes them excellent for writing, summarizing, brainstorming, and image generation. More or less anything you throw at them, they’ll have a pretty good crack at accomplishing.

AI-Enhanced tools

Here, we’re talking about tools and programs that predate AI but use chatbots, or tools derived from GPT systems bolted onto them (plugin-style), with varying degrees of success. Recently, I used Google Ads’ chatbot to find that it wasn’t familiar enough with its own system. After going round in circles for a while, I still had to speak to a human advisor who solved the problem in minutes.

Inadequate systems like this are about as common as well-integrated systems. But some are truly game-changing, and feel like a fresh (and necessary) upgrade to the original service. 

AI-Specific

Finally, there are new tools that have been created since the AI explosion.

With these, AI is not simply a plugin; it is the tool’s core functionality. It’s these, along with a couple of the best “AI-Enhanced” tools, that we’re going to take a closer look at now.

To help differentiate between them, we’ll categorize them by use-case.

Content creation

It’s the way most of us first encountered AI, and it’s certainly not going anywhere. While General AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) can do this pretty well already, there are tools that take it to the next level. 

If General AI is the Swiss Army Knife we mentioned just now, the following tools wrap your Swiss Army Knife in a giant robotic exoskeleton designed specifically for the tasks you’re doing as a business.

Jasper

Jasper is an AI engine built specifically to churn out long-form copy at scale. It takes general AI models and applies thousands of sets of “rules” and stylistic constraints to fine‑tune things like tone of voice, sentence structure, right out of the box. (I know what you’re thinking, and no, this blog is not written by Jasper).

You can adjust how persuasive Jasper’s copy is and how heavily you want it to lean into SEO. It also allows you to add your own rules so it can mimic your voice if you train it well enough. This can be a refreshing change from the emoji-filled, bullet-separated ChatGPT style that gives ChatGPT copy away in five seconds.

Whether it’s a worthy investment for your enterprise depends on a couple of things:

First, you plan to fill your website with many blog posts or long-form articles. If so, Jasper could maximize output, which in turn might improve your site’s SEO.

Second, it depends on how much you covet real, human art forms. Like many of the AI tools we’re about to cover, Jasper could be seen as slightly disingenuous, particularly if your site is in the creative industries and/or champions the art of language. 

It’s also worth noting the price tag. While it has varied, at the time of writing it’s $59 a month for the pro plan, so you’re going to need to use it heavily for it to be worth its hefty price tag (although there’s a limited free plan you can try out).

Hypotenuse AI

If you’re opening a store, particularly one with a large catalog, you can’t really go wrong with Hypotenuse AI. It can create products en masse for your catalog, autofilling titles, descriptions, attributes, and related content. This could save you hours in research and publishing time. You can also ask it to optimize your products for SEO.

In addition to its core function, Hypotenuse can also write other marketing copy and create blog posts. While models like ChatGPT and Copilot are better writers overall (due to how they implement GPT), Hypotenuse’s strength is in generating (for example) 20 similar articles with a consistent structure, while also keeping the tone even.

But really, the extended features are a nice-to-have from a product whose primary purpose is crafting product listings, which it does excellently. It integrates into Shopify, WooCommerce, Salsify, and many other sales platforms, and can also enhance existing listings if you don’t need things from scratch.

In terms of price, it’s currently free for stores with up to 100 products, but after that, pricing is on a “Contact us” basis (which might mean you’ll want to sit down before they say it).

Midjourney

Midjourney is in a class of its own when it comes to image generation. You might want to feature its output directly on your site, but it’s also useful for generating mood boards, concept art, and even product prototypes.  

Midjourney is fascinating because it works in a very different way from the tools we’ve looked at so far. While Jasper and Hypotenuse have their roots in Large Language Models (sometimes more than one), each modified by their unique layers and rules, Midjourney works differently.

It’s still AI, but it’s classed as a Diffusion Model, not a Language Model (I know, stay with me…). Rather than having its origin in huge amounts of text, it learns to generate images by taking photos (for example), reducing them until they’re nothing but white noise (like the static on an old TV), then reverse-engineering them back into something new. So actually, it’s exactly the same as an LLM: Magic.

This fundamental difference makes the results radically different from what you’ll get when you prompt ChatGPT and even DALL-E in the same way. The output is considered more cinematic and praised for its artistic quality.

Unsurprisingly, since early 2025, Midjourney has expanded into video, even offering the ability to ‘animate’ still images in a few clicks. It’s hard to convey Midjourney in words alone, so I highly recommend checking out some of its capabilities.

You can get Midjourney for just $10 a month, so it might be worth trying, even if it’s just while you’re building your site.

Admin and analytics

For argument’s sake, let’s pretend you’ve turned your creative enterprise into a fully-fledged business, and you’re looking to AI to help you make sense of the numbers, or just automate things that become annoying.

Upmetrics

Upmetrics is a suite of tools that harnesses AI to make business easier, especially for the uninitiated. It does this by combining a number of core tools, alongside a collaborative workspace for you and your partners.

Business plans

One of its key USPs is creating AI business plans from scratch, useful for anyone just starting out. Rather than staring at a blank Word document, waiting for inspiration to take hold, it guides you through a ‘setup wizard’ type process, in which you’ll curate a business plan. From here, you can edit and adjust.

Financial forecasting 

AI-powered financial tools can help you practically assess and predict numbers without making unrealistic assumptions. With your guidance, Upmetrics can turn your solid historical data into predictions, pricing strategies, and so on. If Xero (accounting software) monitors what has happened, Upmetrics is about what might happen. 

This isn’t about fully automating your accounts. It’s more like having a financial analyst in the room with you. You can ask questions like “Why is my cash flow negative in month 4?” and get intelligent answers and even suggestions on what to do.

Other tools

Upmetrics is awash with tools that you might find useful when starting out in business. These include limited AI-powered market research tools, tools to create operational plans for the day-to-day running of the business, and many more. It’s worth a look, if only to appreciate the numerous ways they have applied AI in practice to help small businesses. Plans start from around $14/mo.

Zapier AI Actions

This one falls into the ‘AI Addon’ category we talked about at the beginning. Zapier has been intelligently making apps talk to each other for a minute now. Want Google Sheets to talk to Typeform? No problem. Or Shopify to talk to Mailchimp? You got it.

Now, you can add AI steps into these flows. Watch this video about Zapier and tell me you don’t need Zapier AI integrations in your life?

Zapier’s core use case has remained as good as ever. But crucially, you can now integrate AI into these flows. It can be used to classify, transform, write, analyze data, and much more.

This new enhancement takes Zapier to another level in its ability to automate, building on the already good concept of saving you time on repetitive admin tasks.

There are literally thousands of ways you can put Zapier to work, but to use a similar example to one in the video:

You speak a rough idea into your phone, like: ‘Reminder to write a blog post about the key differences between types of mollusks’ (yes, we’re keeping this very high-brow).  

Set up correctly, Zapier could:

You do one small thing, and Zapier automates the rest of the chain, integrating AI where you want it to. Zapier has a free tier, but the paid plans start from around $20/mo.

Customer Support

As this article is mainly about tools that can help you create and automate a website, we’ll just touch on this briefly, referencing a tool that rises to the surface as one of the best examples.

Intercom Fin AI

By this point, we’ve likely all interacted with an AI support robot. While maintaining healthy cynicism around these (like all AI options), I do admit, somewhat shamefully, that when they’re good, they’re really good, saving wait times, hassle, and so on. 

Intercom Fin AI is built for small to medium businesses that don’t need the incredibly complex integrations offered by companies like Zendesk. It’s a full customer support integration that offers:

• AI Support Agent — to handle common customer questions intelligently.
• Human Oversight Layer — escalating chats to you when needed, with full background provided.
• Out‑of‑the‑Box Knowledge Ingestion — learning directly from your website, help centre, FAQs, and product pages without requiring manual “training” (although you can help it along, and fine-tune it).

The essential plan starts at $29/mo, which is pretty decent given how intuitive it is and how it removes the stress of missing emails, which can lead to a bad reputation.

How do all these tools fit in with Gen AI’s premium offerings?

At the start, I described ChatGPT (and others like it) as Swiss Army Knives. Apologies for beating the analogy to death, but if regular GPT is a Swiss Army Knife and Jasper, etc., are transformative exoskeletons, the native premium plans sharpen the blade and replace the fish scaler with literally anything else. 

It won’t give you the huge wrappers that took many hours for companies like Jasper to build, but it does give you increased:

• Power.
• Speed.
• Capacity.
• Reasoning.
• Caricatures of your friends.

Which brilliant for research, ideation, and a day-to-day work companion.

Could I just emulate the other tools in a regular GPT model?

Kind of yes. But also, definitely not. Jasper, for example, is quietly applying thousands of sets of “rules” that alter everything from tone of voice and sentence structure to persuasion and SEO content.

To achieve this with ChatGPT Pro (et al), you’d need to approximate hundreds of templates and thousands of invisible micro-rules, just to get it to behave in a similar way. 

But even this undersells it. Take Jasper’s “Facebook ad – Plain-Agitate-Solution”. It’s not just a set of “rules”; it’s a whole formula designed to create copy optimized for that specific task.

Why not both instead?

So in short, maybe both? The premium AI will be a replacement for your search engine, putting anything and everything at your fingertips, and the bespoke tools (whichever you decide you need most) will be the precision instruments there to tackle the tasks you waste the most time on now.

And I know we’ve only scratched the surface with the AI Tools listed here. This blog would be as long as OpenAI’s dataset if I compiled a complete list of every single one. If there’s something you find yourself doing again and again that’s repetitious, dull, and feels like a machine could do it, there’s almost certainly an AI tool for it. And AI can likely help you find it.

If harnessing the power of AI has inspired you to start your own business, check out our Create & Innovate Sale, until April 20.