AI is on the lips of nearly every business founder these days. Steve Grant, Founder & Managing Director of digital growth agency Figment, and long-term fan of tech evolution to help businesses, uses a plethora of AI tools in his own business to help improve his workflows. Below, he lists five personally recommended AI tools for Business Advice readers.The key advantage of AI isn’t just the tools, it’s about stacking them into workflows. I think a lot of founders like chasing the tools, but don’t think about the workflow. I would say that I save a day per week on where I was by using the right tech, and there’s still room for improvement.
1. ChatGPT and Claude
ChatGPT and Claude are great for having that sounding board. Effectively, you’ve got a strategist, a copywriter and a researcher on demand. It’s like having an intern by your side all of the time. But you still need to be the one that makes the calls. It might sound brilliant, but you need to check that it’s sound. Now, what’s great is that within these tools, they have learning built in. So you’re able to train it on what your company’s standard operating processes are, or your brand guidelines, tone of voice and things like that. It remembers what’s good and what’s bad, which minimises the amount you need to check, but there still has to be some quality assurance. Effectively, ChatGPT is very good at deep thinking and coming up with reasoning. But it’s not as strong at coding as Claude.
2. Granola
Note-taking apps are big now. Personally, I don’t like bots joining calls and taking notes as I find it obtrusive. There’s one AI tool called Granola, which is a bot free AI notepad. It will capture the audio, enhance it with notes and then no bot is joining the call. I think in this world today, we need to make sure that we keep human relationships. And AI should just sit in the background if it’s going to appear. That’s why I’m not a fan of having them on calls.
3. Lovable
With Lovable, you can quickly prototype an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It used to be that you had to scope out work with technical teams and chief technology officers and go to developments and budget and sign off and it would take forever. Now you can literally come up with an idea and in the same day you can turn it into a workable full stack web application. It may not be perfect, but it’s still a good tool for taking things from an idea to a concept very quickly.
4. Motion
Motion is a tool where it will help you automatically schedule deep work, organise tasks, and help to organise your calendar around meetings. We go through the educational system, and we learn all about these different subjects, but no one actually teaches us how to work. So we become, over time, probably less efficient than we should at working. Tools like Motion help you reclaim that whole idea about deep focus and reducing the distractions. And right now, I think there’s just too many things calling for people’s attention. So, this idea of not having to have a dedicated PA, because now you’ve got a tool that can effectively reschedule meetings for you and organise your workflow in the best way, is a cool one.
5. Zapier
Zapier is a fantastic tool for connecting apps together. You can automate multiple steps of workflow without writing code. For example, you can have data entry into an input, which can be a spreadsheet, a form, or some other data entry point. Then it will populate automatically into multiple areas of your business. So you’re cutting out huge amounts of administrative layers. We use Zapier across our business entirely.
AI is on the lips of nearly every business founder these days. Steve Grant, Founder & Managing Director of digital growth agency Figment, and long-term fan of tech evolution to help businesses, uses a plethora of AI tools in his own business to help improve his workflows.
Below, he lists five personally recommended AI tools for Business Advice readers.
The key advantage of AI isn’t just the tools, it’s about stacking them into workflows. I think a lot of founders like chasing the tools, but don’t think about the workflow. I would say that I save a day per week on where I was by using the right tech, and there’s still room for improvement.
