I Ranked the Best AI Tools to Make Money in 2026
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Summary
In this episode, I rank the best and worst AI tools to get rich in 2026. Some of these tools can 10X your business and income, while others are just a massive waste of time. And I've personally tested more than 500 AI tools at my company Martell Ventures.
Transcript
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I rank the best and worst AI tools to get rich in 2026. Some of these tools can 10x your business
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and income while others are just a massive waste of time. And I've personally tested more than 500
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AI tools at my company Martell Ventures because we're an AI incubator and we launch a new company
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every single month. So I have to test them and know if they're going to create value.
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And I'm going to rank the most popular AI tools that everybody's heard about that can actually
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make you money and build wealth in 2026. We got the S tier, that's non-negotiable for the future.
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The A tier, which is widespread, but not universally known. B tier, which is niche,
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but valuable. The C tier might work in the rare cases, but most people won't see consistent ROI.
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And then finally, the F tier. Essentially, don't fucking bother. It might be flashy,
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but honestly, there's no real value. Number one is mid journey. Essentially,
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it allows you to take prompts and generate images. It was like one of those early apps that when
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ChatGPT came out, people were using it because it essentially used the same prompt structure to
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create images. Can you make money? Yeah. A lot of people use MidJourney and act as a service to
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create brand packages or website designs or any visual Photoshop type thing. Easy to use, super
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simple. I just don't think long-term it'll be there. Where do I think this one sits? It is
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kind of niche. You can do a lot of this and other tools. I'm going to put it in B.
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Number two is RunwayML. Essentially, this is an AI-powered video generating tool. You can use
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it to create marketing collateral, walkthroughs. Think of any video generation. So you can get
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paid to do it for other businesses. You can also use it in your business to create marketing
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collateral i think the easy use it's not there it's a lot harder to use than most of these tools
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but i think like long term it's pretty good i would probably put it in a b every business no
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video creators for sure but it's less for like everyday use i'm gonna put runway in front of
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mid journey because video is more interesting to me than photos number three 11 labs now they're
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kind of OG AI. They've been around for a while, produces uber realistic AI voices. We use it all
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the time for this very specific use case where I mispronounce a word like rigorlessly. Yes,
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make fun of me. I don't care. Then the team can actually use it to create what's called pickups
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rigorously. So yes, this is Dan. Ouch. I'm pinching myself, not AI, but sometimes the voice
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has to be AI because it saves me time from having to come back in the studio. If you're in a business
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that generates a lot of creative that has voiceovers,
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super powerful, huge opportunity to make a ton of money,
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do it for yourself as a marketing thing, easy to use.
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I know that most entrepreneurs are literally struggling trying to figure out what are the
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tools? How do I use them? How do I actually use them to grow my business? So that's why I built
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the AI company OS. Essentially, it's the exact system my team and I use to automate and scale
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every department across $100 million portfolio. So if you want a copy of that, just click the
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link or scan the QR code and I'll get you a copy for free. That's my gift to you.
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Number four is HeyJet, another tool that's been around since the beginning. It allows you to
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create AI avatar videos from just text. And it's kind of leading the front. There's a few other
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ones that are like coming up and they still are in private beta, but Hey Jen is really cool. And
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a lot of people are using it for creating training videos, product explainers, marketing videos,
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essentially it's a way for you to scale your content output. Money-making, if you can convince
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a business owner to actually use the tool, they'll pay you to set it up. The easy use is high. So
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And then I would say the future of it being that platform
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It's a fun tool, but limited use depending on your business.
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Cause Runway actually has a better product suite.
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It's not as good as Runway, better than Midjury.
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Essentially it's like having a full-time designer
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on your team to generate reports and proposals and outputs.
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I just think that most people can use this tool
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But I have friends that use it to create pitch decks
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They seem to be the category winner in this space.
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I think they should make everything they produce
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Essentially generates concept art and branded visuals.
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The problem is when you generate branded material,
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styles the flexibility it makes it ideal for designers designers love this tool but can you
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make money with this for most people you kind of need to be a designer so I'm going to give you a
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low score there is it easy to use yep relatively easy is it going to be relevant for the future
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again it's competitive it has a strong niche appeal like designers do love it but limited
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to broad use so I'm going to put it in B it's very niche but valuable and I'm going to put it
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third in the list. Number seven, Zapier. This one is really cool. It's a tool that helps you
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automate your business processes. They've been around forever, way before AI. I've been using
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it for, I think, close to a decade now. 6,000 apps to automate your workflow. The cool part
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is no code required. I know hundreds of agencies that are using Zapier to make a ton of money,
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automate business processes. It's relatively easy. When you get into some more sophisticated stuff,
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it's there and they've been around for so long they have the enterprise space and they've added
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the tools and they were quick to adopt ai i'm giving this s tier this one is one that's foundation
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to any modern business i'm going to put it above gamma now we've got a competitor gum loop i love
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it because i am a sucker for good user experience it's a visual ai workflow builder so same thing
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automate workflows it's visual a lot more visual than zapier we built a whole bunch of financial
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automation using Gumloop, recruiting processes using Gumloop. So I'm a fan. It's a solid option.
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I think you can make money with this. It's a lot higher on ease of use, even though it's newer in
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a smaller community, but it's making a bet long term. I just don't think you need it if you've
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got Zapier. So I'm going to put it in the A tier. We're going to put it in front of 11 labs. You got
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to automate your business. Number nine is N8N. What I love about it is open source. I'm a big
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fan of open source open source essentially means that the code base is available for anybody to
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look at it so you don't have to worry if the company is doing things right because you can
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actually audit the code you don't have to pay for licenses it's essentially free if you can set up
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your own servers it's a little best suited for like developers you can make money because it's
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automation a lot a lot of people use it for more complicated workflows but the learning curve is a
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lot harder so it's got a low score there and i think it's going to be relevant because it is
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the open source tool of choice right now amongst technical people so i'm gonna give it a
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you need a tool for workflow but you don't need that tool so i'm gonna put it on the end of an a
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number 10 your atlas.com essentially anything voice and phone call it can automate and act
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as like a revenue tool for you we use it for outbound qualifying we use it for inbound responses
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full disclosure this is one of my portfolio companies at martell ventures but it's a tool
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that not only do we use in all my portfolios but also my brother uses it my friends use it it is
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a really cool tool big fan obviously i'm a little biased but let me tell you why i think it's cool
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number one a lot of people are using atlas to get paid to set this up for companies so you can make
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money really quick the learning curve is not that high i mean you just need to understand basic
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prompt engineering and then the future of voice and ai i think every interface in the future will
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go away and it'll all be voice you're probably doing this right now with ai you're talking to
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it a lot if you look inside of some of the top tech companies they have these like little mics
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with a long pole and a little mic and everybody's whisper prompting their prompts on their computer
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it's really interesting the world's probably going to go there and your atlas.com is the
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platform right now i think to do that you should just try it out go check out your atlas.com and
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just like have it call you it's really cool as a business tool i just don't see you doing things
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that don't involve calls i know it sounds self-serving so i don't want you to take it
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the wrong way but i'm gonna put it at the top it's an s at the end of s number 11 fixer.ai
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fixer ai is essentially an email ai tool so it'll help you like categorize your email get sorted
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it's a tool to help you be more productive in your inbox clever idea super cool can you make
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money with it it'll save you time i don't think you can like get paid from other people to set
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it up learning how to use it is always a little bit difficult with kind of workflows because you
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probably have a certain way you like to use your inbox so i'm gonna put it in c i think it's cool
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i've mentioned it before but it's not a must considering the other tools number 12 is notion
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AI. Notion is a project management workspace for businesses. The AI specific is their assistant.
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It's built into Notion that helps you with writing and taking notes and organizational. So that's
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what I'm essentially assessing. Cool part is it integrates naturally with your existing workspace
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within Notion. So if you use Notion, thumbs up. Money making and save you time. It's cool. It's
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still not where I need it to be. And I don't think anybody's going to pay you just for the AI part.
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that is going to try to be the search or the brain
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If you had a knowledge base or a brain, an AI brain
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So now all of a sudden, Buddy Pro can power the response.
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it's a really smart way to solve this problem long-term
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that's completely different than just like a custom GPT.
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You get on a Zoom call and you got the thing recording
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so that you have clear understanding of what's been said,
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If you're not the kind of person that writes things down,
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If you don't have somebody in your meetings, yes.
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yep literally click click install it starts working is it going to be the one that's going
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to win the future amongst all my smart technical ai people it's their favorite and that's usually
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a good sign so i'm going to make it mandatory i think it's s i think everybody should use granola
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i think it's in front of your atlas for sure and honestly even in front of gamma if you don't use
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it check it out i think you'll be happy you do number 15 we got chat gpt the big dog the one
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that started it all okay two and a half years ago do you know close to 700 million people use
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chat gpt every week as bananas conversational ai for writing coding automation it does more than
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most people realize obviously it's going to make you a ton of money it's incredibly easy to use
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literally if you want to learn how to use ai ask ai it'll tell you wild i know they've raised so
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much money that they're at the point where they're too big to fail so where do i put gpt at the very
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very, very front. It's dominating the market. It's number one S. Use it. If you're not using
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it, learn it. I created a whole masterclass video on chat GPT. You can search for that.
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It'll teach you how to become next level. It's number one. Number 16, Claude, which is the AI
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by Anthropic. I use all the AIs and I'm going to rank them today, but Claude's one specifically
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for writing and for code. Yes, GPT-5 is getting better, but still on certain types of projects,
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it's still winning there will it make you money less than chat gpt because i think it's a use case
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if you're not using as much very easy to use are they going to be around long term yeah they're
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not going anywhere they'll probably get bought by somebody i'm going to put it in front of zapier
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number 17 we've got perplexity.ai this is like the battle of the language models perplexity was the
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first search engine that was powered by ai now it's kind of like everywhere gpt launched atlas
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their own browser google's got the ai answers integrating the search results but perplexity
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was the first one and what's unique is that feedback is verified sources which is cool
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because sometimes you have a hallucination with the other language models in many ways it's kind
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of a novelty i'm not going to put it even after granola we're going to go zapier granola perplexity
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some of you guys will be like oh i disagree that's cool my ranking that's where i'm going to put it
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number 18 gemini google what google is doing that it's got an advantage over is that it integrates
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all of its existing tools so here's the thing is it would go ahead of everybody if it was not
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integrated but if you're not a google ecosystem customer then i'm going to put it third behind
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claude number 19 notebook lm essentially it's google's ai for analyzing and summarizing files
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information research there's one use case that i think most people don't know about where you can
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feed it to like youtube videos and actually tell it to like talk to you through the videos
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but it generates like a narrative back and forth it's like creating your own podcast and i think
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it's really tailored for like researchers writers and students so it's not in every company i wouldn't
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even say it's an a it's kind of a niche thing if you want to get nerdy on this stuff it's in the c
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it's interesting but it's not necessarily needed number 20 is grok elon buys x takes the ai team
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spins it out as XAI, brands it as Grok, raises a bunch of money, built this crazy data center.
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The reason why it's on this list is because I use it more and more. It keeps getting better
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week over week. I actually use Grok Heavy, which is the $300 a month plan. It is the best one for
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accuracy, depth of research that I've found. I'm just looking long term. I'm thinking it's way
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better than Gemini. I think he's going to beat Claude and I think it's going to be number two
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behind openai's chat gbt that's where i'm putting it i see the updates i see the focus the first
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principles approach it's one i'm going to bet on number 21 revio if you do any kind of selling
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over chat i'm talking support emails linkedin instagram facebook then having an ai sales
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assistant is key revio is one of our portfolio company inside of martel ventures we use it all
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the time i use it my wife uses it can it make you money a ton of money most people don't know that
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if you talk to your followers on social media those are called leads you make money with leads
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is it going to be relevant long term i think so i'm going to put it in c so it's tough to justify
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but here's the deal if you use instagram for business it's a must okay so it's niche number
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22 lovable now this is one of my favorites lovable has been around for a while it helps people that
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are not technical build apps all my friends that come to me with they're like i've got a tech idea
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dan i say just go play with lovable the cool part is you can use chat gpt to write the prompt to then
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insert it into lovable so that it can create the app the way you want i think the future of business
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is these disposable apps that help run departments right now we use spreadsheets in the future will
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be apps lovable is that platform i know people that make a lot of money selling lovable apps to
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businesses and charge $10,000, $15,000 for these apps that AI generated. And I know a lot of
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businesses that are using it for that disposable idea to save time to build automation. You need
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to know how to prompt so it's not as easy to use, but they're well-funded. I think they'll be around
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for a while. The future is going there, but there's other tools that everybody should be using before
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then in your business. So I'm going to put it at the end of the row B. Number 23 is Cursor AI.
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If you're a technical person, Cursor is crazy cool.
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It's an IDE, an integrated development environment
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I love that Apple branded AI, Apple Intelligence.
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Like if you saw their ads, they were like Apple Intelligence.
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nobody uses it people that try to go back to the other ai tools they focus on privacy which is kind
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of a cornerstone to apple's brand the problem is it's not good crazy i'm doing this because it's
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an apple product apple hasn't innovated in a while so i'm putting it into f run away until
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they launch something way better don't use it use any of the other tools so we've ranked all these
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tools and i can understand it might feel super overwhelming here's what i want to encourage you
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to do now take the one that you were like oh that's interesting I could see how I would use
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that in my business and then just spend the next two weeks a installing it like right now go install
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it then set it up and then just like force yourself to build the new habit to use it because
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a lot of technology it's not can it do the thing is do you remember to use it go do a project and
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start trying to habit stack connect the using of that new AI tool to another habit in your workday
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That's how we start the process of using these tools
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Now, if you wanna learn what are the best businesses
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to start, click here and I'll see you on the other side.