We’ve personally used all of these and have no financial incentive to recommend any to you (except our own, of course).
There are so many lists out there of ‘best’ AI tools that we thought it important that we add our own.
These tools are in the context of AI-powered or AI-focused tools that make our life easier.
1. Attio – Best AI CRM
Attio is an AI-powered CRM built to manage customer relationships and sales workflows. Its interface is super simple to use, and it doesn’t feel like the other CRMs on the market. We’ve used everything from the major enterprise CRMs to custom builds, and this one is our current winner.
2. Linear – Best AI Project Management System
Our new project management darling is Linear – a replacement for Jira, which is just – even though they have tried – not built for marketing teams. Linear assists you with project and issue tracking with AI built in to help organize incoming work and automate product workflows. What you used to have to configure yourself and was super complicated, now you can just tell Linear and it builds it for you. We love a Kanban and a sprint, and Linear checks all these boxes.
3. Seed – Best AI Visibility and Brand Placement Tool
We’d be remiss if we didn’t have a list of the best AI tools and include ourselves. You must have faith in your own product! There’s not a lot of us on the market, but Seed is really cool because it combines AI technology with strategic human oversight to get you brand placements that will grow your AI visibility today, tomorrow, and in the future. You can track that visibility growth inside the tool. We put ourselves third because it felt too on-the-nose to place ourselves first, but we deserve a spot at the top!
4. Firecrawl – Best Data Scraper
Over half of internet search traffic now is bots, not humans. Firecrawl turns website content into structured data for AI tools and agents. We use it to scrape data and brand mentions from the web. Not sure if that’s its intended use case, but we do this with it. It has a cool dashboard and functions quickly.
5. Resend – Best Email Router
Resend is an email infrastructure tool with AI tools for creating, editing, and sending emails. We like how simple this is to set up, low cost and quick functioning. If you have a newsletter or form on your site, we love this connection to your inbox with the AI capabilities built in so you can describe the function you want, and it can set it up for you.
6. Cursor – Best AI Coding Tool
Cursor is an AI coding tool for building, editing, and maintaining software. We use it to help build our software and it is built into Grok. It’s part of the stack that helps bring you Seed.
7. OpenAI Codex – Best AI Coder
We couldn’t have just one coding tool in here, so we had to include another one. Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent for writing code, fixing bugs, and building applications. Since the switch to Astra, it seems to be better than other products on the market.
8. ChatGPT – Best AI Researcher
I personally like ChatGPT’s research more now than Google. I find that it can give you good, specific examples, and you can put good parameters and guardrails around your research to make it really focus.
9. Claude – Best AI Design and Writing Helper
Claude is another answer engine with other internal capabilities, some of which we use a lot. You can get mockups from a human designer for a presentation or landing page, and Claude can build from the Figma files. It can design on its own, but everything starts to look the same as everything else on the web. If you need a small amount of writing done, Claude is great for distilling complicated information into another format, like if you want to take a sample contract and prepare it for a guide or a newsletter.
10. Descript – Best AI Enabled Video Tool
Video can be so complicated, and what we love about Descript is how easy it is to use. You simply shoot your video and upload, and the AI inside the tool can take care of some of the heavy lifting for you, like removing ums and ahs. It’s easy to delete or reorder frames and you can have a workable video in a matter of minutes. The AI also does a good job with captions.
Written by Sarah GilbertBrand placements. AI visibility. A clearer way to see the whole picture.