Tools of the Year (2025): The ones I'll be bringing into 2026
ChatGPT:
The anchor behind everything. I use it as a tutor & thinking partner for pretty much everything.
Use it for:Strategy, mapping process, learning new skills, building in real time, structuring content & weekly non negotiables.
WhisperFlow
AI transcription assistant- press a hot key to chat to everything on your phone or laptop. We type around 51 words per minute vs speaking 161 words per minute. That’s roughly a 3x productivity boost straight away.
Use it for:Dictate everything- drafts, notes, replies, ideas. We’ll wonder why we need keyboards by the end of next year.
Perplexity
The fastest way to get context driven research across the most reliable & widest range of sources.
Use it for:Building a source pack (credible links) before I write, present, or form an opinion. Gathering consensus or planning GEO strategies.
NotebookLM
Get a solid understanding of large amounts of complex material quickly & turn the TLDR into publishable outputs.
Use it for:Executive summaries, podcasts, slides, infographics,
Gemini + Google AI Studio
The multi media timesaver. Turn one asset into 15 more.
Use it for:Anything Multimodal. Ask it to summarise YouTube videos and search for similar topics then distil that information into Slides, images, infographics, diagrams, videos, apps, landing pages.
Figma
The best way to work on shotlists, outline workflows & find inspiration for UI concepts.
Use it for:Turning a process into a clean visual. Use the ChatGPT Figma connector to refine a concept in chat GPT then ask it to build that out in Figma for you to refine from there.
Calm Authority.ai
Best new AI writing tool. Helps you draft credible, consistent output in your own voice.
Use it for:Turning ideas and relevant topics into professional output in your true TOV. Generate drafts from an article or URL, or straight from an idea. Still in closed beta, but definitely one to check out in the new year.
Krea.ai
Image & video generation with multiple models & multiple outputs.
Use it for:Storyboarding, ‘enhance’ or ‘masking’ when you want more control over edits.Top tip: Generate multiple shots per idea (angles, lighting, mood), pick the winners, then refine.
Relay.app
The most beginner-friendly way to build simple agents with human-in-the-loop approvals.
Use it for:Streamlining multi-step tasks across apps without losing control. Connecting to a huge range of AI tools in one place and getting a solid understanding of workflows.
Canva
High-quality design with everything you could possibly need in 1x place.
Use it for:Carousels, one-pagers, decks, proposals. Remove background, Magic Grab, Magic Edit, BG generator, Resize for different platforms.Use Instagram as your cheat sheet. Search Canva hacks, save the best, use those to inspire new ideas.
Descript
Editing video by editing a transcript is still the most practical time-saver.
Use it for:Cutting long-form, removing filler words, identifying speakers, cleaning audio, pulling highlights. Reframing, Screen recording, recording tutorials etc. Top tip: Import straight from YouTube. Great for grabbing clips to use as examples.
Opus Clip
The strongest clip selection I’ve used for turning long-form into short-form.
Use it for:Longform to shortform clip selection, reframing, captions, and iterating hooks and titles. It also gives clips a virality score based on hook, flow, viewer value, and trends.
Gamma
Presentations that look super professional from the outset. Customise your brand theme, ‘Generate with AI’ for the design but insert your own fixed text.
Use it for:Decks & web-published one-pagers. Smart diagrams and quick edits inside the doc. Top tip: Paste in text and use --- to control slide breaks.
YouTube
The most underrated AI workflow tool. It’s my library of AI knowledge as well as staying up to date on what’s happening and best use cases.
Use it for:Hearing from those 2x steps ahead of you and following along when you’re learning a new skill. Finding use-case inspiration, and staying current.
Speechify
Transfer anything written into your own personal podcast. Copy& paste or upload text or articles and listen on the go.
Use it for:Long articles, PDFs, newsletters. Also listening to my own work back before I publish. You can save inputs to go back to & listen with several different voices in up to 3x speed output.
Lovable.dev
Vibe coding real deployable apps with no code. Add OAth, database & API’s all via text based prompts.
Use it for:Prompt-to-app prototypes so a workflow becomes a repeatable system, not a one- off effort. Top tip: A strong PRP (product requirements prompt) is everything.