These Are the 50 Best AI Tools Right Now If you want to help your team work smarter and faster, our panel of experts says these AI tools are worth your time.
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Last year, AI was new and shiny. This year, it's business time. So we wanted to create a practical, real-world, useful guide to tools you and your team can use now — saving time and growing with AI.
The trouble is, as everyone rushes their innovations to market, we're getting flooded with options, and it's hard to to know what's worth the time and money. Is it better to get the absolute best tool for a specialized task, or go all-in on a more general platform that does many things well? We wanted context. So we put together a panel of experts to share their must-have tools, and explain when and why they're worthwhile. Then we organized their selections into different "use case" categories for easier navigation.
Our Panel of Experts
→ Zain Kahn, author of Superhuman AI, an AI newsletter with over 1 million subscribers
→ Aadit Sheth, author of Prompts Daily, an AI newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers
→ David Gewirtz, senior contributing editor at ZDNet, a business technology publication
→ Rob Lubeck, strategist and chief revenue officer at RTS Labs, an AI consulting firm
→ Tom Davenport, distinguished professor of information technology at Babson College, author of The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work
→ Trond Undheim, executive director of Babson College's C. Dean Metropoulos Institute for Technology and Entrepreneurship, author of forthcoming book The Platinum Workforce
→ Connor Raney and Spencer Karns, Babson Generator Research Lab student leaders
→ Jack Turner, editor at Tech.co, a technology news
Data Analytics
Gewirtz, editor at ZDNet, says not to sleep on Microsoft's AI assistant, which has the benefit of integrating with Excel.
Kahn of Superhuman AI recommends Julius AI, which "lets you upload your data files and analyze or visualize them, and ask questions about the data in your files and get answers quickly."
Lubeck of RTS Labs says that Google's AI assistant is particularly good at "predictive modeling for finance, operations, and customer insights."
When paired with SQL Integrations, Lubeck says that Claude by Anthropic has the benefit of "allowing users to query business data in natural language."
Related: What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Here Are Its Benefits, Uses and More
Image and Video Generation
The most prominent of text-to-image AI tools, Gewirtz says he pays for Midjourney's monthly subscription because "it seems to be the best at capturing the essence of requests and creating both photorealistic images and what appear to be staged dioramas."
A video generator that uses "AI actors" or user-generated content (UGC) to create ads quickly. Kahn says it's "pretty cool for generating UGC video ads that can be used for paid marketing on socials."
Davenport, the information technology professor at Babson, likes that Krea.ai "creates custom visual assets from text prompts with style and consistency, and produces marketing visuals at a fraction of traditional design costs."
Related: Why Every Company Should Be Thinking About Artificial Intelligence
Document Summarization and Note-Taking
Numerous experts said that NotebookLM is tops for metabolizing documents and notes. Kahn of Superhuman AI says it's "Google's most successful AI tool so far," and Sheth of Prompts Daily says, "You can feed it lengthy documents, reports, or transcripts, and it extracts the essential ideas without losing important context. Unlike many summarization tools that churn out superficial bullet points, NotebookLM highlights nuanced points. But it's still experimental, so occasionally I double-check the summaries for accuracy."
This enhanced meeting notes program is a favorite of both the Babson team and Sheth, who says, "It's perfect if you prefer taking your own notes during meetings but worry about missing critical details. You take brief notes manually, and Granola's AI enhances them afterward. It clarifies your points, organizes the content, and captures anything you might have missed. If you rely entirely on AI, the output can feel generic, so active participation is key."
For companies concerned with security around file sharing, Kahn notes that Box AI's content management platform "has a lot of agent workflows and features for the enterprise that are secure and compliant—a big deal for most enterprises."
For companies looking to create a custom internal AI-powered document retrieval system, Lubeck of RTS Labs recommends LlamaIndex.
For anyone working at a high level of specialization, Undheim of Babson likes that this AI-driven document summarization program "contextually links and organizes key insights across documents with semantic understanding," but notes that it has a "steep learning curve for optimal use."
For high-speed audio transcription, Undheim likes Superwhisper, which he says "converts audio to text with exceptional accuracy and speaker differentiation."
Related: Going All in on AI? Here's How to Navigate the Psychology of Artificial Intelligence
Voice Tools
If you want to create a voice AI, Undheim says that ElevenLabs excels at creating "lifelike AI voices with emotional range and multilingual capabilities.
Specializing in AI customer service agents, Babson's Davenport says that Intercom's 24/7 customer support is effective with "intent recognition and sentiment analysis."
Related: AI for the Underdog — Here's How Small Businesses Can Thrive With Artificial Intelligence
Email Outreach and Automation
Sheth of Prompts Daily says that Instantly.ai "enhances our cold email process by automating follow-ups, keeping emails out of spam, and ensuring no lead slips through the cracks."
Another favorite of Sheth's is Typefully, which he recommends for marketers, content creators, or anyone juggling social accounts: "There's no clutter—just a simple workflow designed specifically for these platforms. It's great for standard posting, but thread scheduling could be more flexible."
Recommended by several of our experts, Zapier is good at connecting various AI apps and automating across platforms, including email. Kahn calls it a "safe choice for folks who are already familiar with Zapier and use it in their workflows."
Kahn says, "Ruby is great for sales research and sales automation. Our sales team has been seeing significantly better response rates to cold outreach, as well as conversion on calls."
Babson's Davenport says that Kit (formerly ConvertKit) "tailors content to audience engagement patterns with behavioral segmentation, and maximizes engagement for creators and small businesses with personalized automation."
Babson's Undheim says that Hubspot's AI-enhanced email marketing system is comprehensive, in that it "integrates email optimization with complete customer journey data and predictive analytics."
A send-time optimization tool designed for use with HubSpot and Marketo, Undheim says Seventh Sense "uses behavioral analytics to identify optimal email delivery times for each recipient, dramatically improving engagement rates."
It's a conversational AI assistant for CRM — helping you engage with and manage customers without the usual CRM tedium.
Related: Don't Be Afraid Of AI — Your Fears Are Unfounded, and Here's Why
Writing
"It's by far the best for writing copy," Kahn says, "and the Projects feature is a great way to streamline repetitive copywriting tasks." Turner says, "Claude's most advanced language model, Sonnet, is particularly impressive."
For writing LinkedIn posts specifically, Kahn says that Scrybe "is amazing for generating content. I've been using it a lot to create my LinkedIn posts. It's great for both finding content ideas and writing them quickly."
If you're looking to produce longer-form content, like newsletters, blog posts or reports, Sheth says Lex is another great tool to use.
For marketers in search of copywriting assistance, Davenport at Babson says that Copy.ai "generates creative content based on minimal input, while maintaining consistent brand voice."
Davenport says the interconnected Notion workspace makes its integrated writing assistant very effective at "summarizing content, improving writing, and generating ideas within documents."
Related: Artificial Intuition is the Next Phase of Artificial Intelligence
Research and Development
If you want information on your leads, fast, Sheth says that "Perplexity.ai dramatically speeds up lead qualification without sacrificing quality. Instead of spending valuable time manually researching leads, you get immediate access to essential details such as revenue, team size, funding, and personal insights."
For niche or specialized industries, Undheim at Babson says this AI-powered search engine "searches for specific data sets and builds custom databases with semantic understanding."
Undheim also thinks this audience research and intelligence tool is excellent: "It discovers what your audience reads, watches, and listens to through behavioral analysis, and enables highly targeted marketing."
"It transforms text into beautiful, professional slides with design intelligence," Undheim says, "reducing creation time from hours to minutes."
"It transforms product ideas into visual prototypes with rapid iteration, reducing time from concept to testable prototype," says Undheim.
Related: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Way We Make Videos
Talent Strategy and Recruiting
It can help you hire today, and anticipate your staffing tomorrow, Davenport says. "Using predictive matching, it creates talent pools based on potential, not just experience. And it builds proactive recruitment pipelines that anticipate future hiring needs."
This talent intelligence platform uses deep learning algorithms to predict future skill gaps, and find candidates with growth potential. Davenport says it needs significant data to perform optimally, but "reduces hiring bias and improves retention."
Ever in an interview, and wanted a gut check? HireVue is a video interview platform with a built-in AI assessment. "It evaluates candidates based on scientifically validated competency models and communication patterns," Undheim says. (Though some candidates may find the video assessments impersonal.)
Undheim likes this skills-based talent intelligence platform, which he says "enables proactive upskilling and internal mobility based on future business needs."
Related: 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Already Influencing Your Daily Life and You Don't Even Know It
Managing Inventory
Another mainstay that's helpful in this area, Lubeck says that Claude is "useful for generating supply chain insights and predicting inventory needs based on historical data."
When combined with Vertex AI, Lubeck says Google's AI assistant "can be integrated into custom inventory solutions for demand forecasting and automated decision-making."
Davenport says this inventory management system uses AI to "centralize inventory with demand prediction, preventing overselling and optimizing stock levels."
If you want an AI to manage actual purchase decisions, Davenport says this intelligent order management system "automates purchase order creation based on sales velocity and seasonal trends."
For big companies, Undheim says that NetSuite's enterprise-grade inventory management system is hard to beat. "It provides end-to-end supply chain visibility with predictive insights and anomaly detection, which enables sophisticated inventory optimization."
Related: 3 Entrepreneurial Uses of Artificial Intelligence That Will Change Your Business
Should You Just Skip This Whole List?
And just use ChatGPT instead? Some experts say yes.
Despite recommending all these specialized tools, a few of our experts made the same point: For most people, ChatGPT does pretty much everything you need. So if you're feeling overwhelmed by choice, just stick with it.
"It streamlines work processes and makes the shift to AI less intimidating," says AI consultant Arturo Ferreira, cofounder of The AI Report, a newsletter with over 400,000 subscribers. "Introducing too many niche solutions can overwhelm people and slow down the adoption of AI. In the end, keeping things simple and demonstrating clear benefits is what really drives successful AI adoption."
Can Anything Truly Detect AI?
The answer: Yes, maybe, sometimes.
As AI tools proliferate, so do AI detection tools — which promise to identify AI writing and deepfake images, videos, and documents. But don't take their answers as gospel, our experts say.
Kahn of Superhuman AI says he's heard from a lot of students and other professionals who were falsely accused of using AI in their work. "No tool is infallible," says Turner of Tech.co. "These platforms should be used to complement other methods."
That's not to say these tools are worthless. Established players like Reality Defender, Sensity AI, and Sentinel provide important services like spotting fraudulent documents and voice cloning attacks, and a relatively new Dutch company called Cyberette has a product that claims a 99.7% detection accuracy rate. ZDNet regularly conducts tests, and got perfect results from GPTZero, Originality.ai, and Undetectable AI.
