Top 12 AI Tools That Will Actually Grow Up Your Business in 2026

Introduction

I’ve tried more than 500 AI tools, and these are the ones that will actually blow up your business. I own dozens of AI companies, and I can tell you in the new AI era, you won’t get rich by working more. You’ll get rich by using the tools that help you work less.

And no, this isn’t a basic AI tutorial that you’ve seen a hundred other times. These AI tools are what I’m using right now in all of my companies to get more done and stay ahead of the competition. So, let’s dive in.

Tool 1: Granola.ai – Your AI Meeting Assistant

What I love about Granola that none of the other apps do, first off, it doesn’t join your freaking meetings. Have you ever noticed all these notetakers? I literally don’t let them in my meetings. It uses the audio on your app and it’s local so that nobody else sees it that you’re recording.

Why Granola Stands Out

The other part is it has AI assisted notes, meaning that I can type out in granola in real time in the meeting and afterwards it merges the transcripts with my notes to create something very comprehensive.

And finally, my favorite part is it truly acts as an AI second brain. Like I can ask it, show me all the meetings where we discuss pricing and it’ll show it to me. It’s a gamechanger when it comes to just making your meetings so freaking efficient.

So that’s just the first tool. We’ve got 11 more. It’ll help you print freaking money.

Tool 2: N8N – Workflow Automation That Scales

N8N essentially allows you to connect everything and create workflows and using AI to help it route and make decisions for you because that’s what AI does better than anything else. Automation is the future and why AI is going to transform the business world.

And it scales without adding any headcount. It frees your team to actually focus on what matters and drives growth, which is talking to customers and making sure the team is good and hiring better people. That is what’s powerful.

Challenge: Automate Your Entire Onboarding

So, I’m going to challenge you to automate your whole onboarding. Here’s the whole flow that I do in almost 90% of my companies.

Step 1: Payment Triggers CRM

First thing is once the payment happens, that triggers that information being added to the CRM. That’s step one.

Step 2: Welcome Email

Send them a welcome email. What’s different with AI is I can personalize that email based on the information I captured from the call or that payment.

Step 3: Intake Form

Send them an email to fill out an intake form. The intake form is everything I would normally ask on the call. The cool part is step three can actually be done over voice, which we’ll talk about some tools on how to do that. So, they don’t have to fill out a form. They can actually get a phone call and talk to a real person, aka AI, to get that information.

Step 4: Support Access

Invite them to your support. Right? If that’s a community or a Slack channel, you can invite them into that world. So, it’s all automated.

Step 5: Follow-Up Automation

Send them a follow-up email only based on the things they haven’t done yet. So, it can monitor and make decisions and send very personalized emails to get them to complete those steps.

Step 6: Team Call Invitation

Invite them to a call with one of your team members so they can walk them through how the whole process is going to work.

Step 7: Personalized Presentation

But on that call, and this is step seven, is there’s an automation that creates a personalized presentation based on the intake form that that person on the call presents to the client to show them exactly how what you do is going to be customized for them. That is all done automagically.

Alternative Options

Now, here’s the deal. N8N is prolevel. If you want to go something more intermediate, check out make.com. If you want something that’s tried and true and I’ve been using for almost a decade, check out Zapier. But OpenAI not too long ago just launched agent builder. So you want to watch out for what they build because even though today it looks very advanced, it could get really simple and universal for everything else. So I’m keeping an eye on it.

Tool 3: Lovable.dev – Build Apps Without Code

All right, automation’s running. Cool. Now let’s build faster than any of your competitors.

This is going to blow your mind. Lovable is the easiest way to build any app. So you know those people that like, I got an app idea, you can build it. In the past, you had to hire a developer. Now, you just need to know how to type any language, English, Spanish, Mandarin, it doesn’t matter.

How Lovable Works

Essentially, the AI is smart enough to figure it out and it will build you an app that you can ship and use. So, imagine you have a social media marketing platform and you want to run some ads for just plumbers in the Midwest. So, you need a landing page just for that audience.

What you can do is go to Lovable and say, “Build me a landing page for my social media marketing agency for plumbers in the Midwest.” And hit enter. It will then build that whole thing.

Now you also want to take payment. So you say, okay, add stripe payment so I can collect a deposit. So then you get the output and you might say, well now I want to add some other things like a form to collect information about the customer and the ability to get a deposit so I can get a commitment from the person buying.

You hit enter and lovable will add all those features to that page. You generate it, you test it, and you deploy it. It’s that simple.

Speed Is a Competitive Advantage

So now we went from having to come up with an idea and hiring programmers to build stuff to having the idea, being able to type it and describe it and hit enter. The future of building apps for your business is going to shift everything. Speed is a competitive advantage. Don’t sleep on this one.

Tool 4: YourAtlas.com – AI Sales Assistant

So now that you can build apps at lightning speed, it’s time to close the deals.

Atlas is one of my portfolio companies where you can have it call leads instantly, ask it to qualify those leads, and have it sell and book meetings 24/7. No bad days, no going off script, no taking vacation. This thing runs automatically in real time.

Real-World Example

We actually use it across all my companies. When somebody fills out a form, it calls them right away. I was showing my father-in-law the other night at dinner and he’s like, “Who’s Emma?” And I was like, “Well, Emma’s the AI.” He’s like, “Well, where does she live?” “No, like Emma’s not real.” “What do you mean she’s not real? She just called you.” I said, “I know. I was just showing you the example of how it works. That’s Emma’s not real. That is artificial intelligence.” And his brain just went…

Why Speed to Lead Matters

Speed to lead is how you increase your pipeline conversions. The faster you can contact or call anybody fills out a form or just follow up quickly to get them scheduled, you will stop them from searching for other solutions and they become your customer.

Because once you see it, you’ll understand how it works. So, just go to youratlas.com. Fill in the form. Have it call you and watch it handle your objections and then get you on a call. Say, “All right, let’s talk. Are you free? 3:00 Eastern time next Thursday.” And it’ll go burp. And you can hear it typing, checking the calendar. And it waits.

Even try hanging up before the confirmation. Guess what it’s going to do? Call you back and try to get you to book that call. Very realistic. All AI.

Tool 5: 11Labs.io – Voice Cloning Technology

Now, great. That’s your booking engine. Now, we got to create a voice that can sell no matter what.

This one’s kind of like the OG AI. It’s been around forever. And what’s crazy is that it allows you to clone your voice. Would you be surprised to find out that sometimes I can’t pronounce words like regularlessly. The cool part now with an AI voice clone is they can do all of the pickups that I used to have to come into the studio to re-record now using my voice AI.

The Power of Voice Cloning at Scale

But think about it. When you can clone your voice at scale to deliver an incredible customer experience, that is powerful. If you’re a business owner, you should be creating content.

How to Use 11Labs for Your Business

So, for example, my brother sells homes. So, the first thing he needs to do is go create a voice clone for himself. So, he uses 11 Labs. He gives it a clean sample in the app. He just follows the script and that way it creates that AI clone for him.

The second thing is you want to go find a video where you’re like the energy’s off or you misspoke or you forgot to say something and then just have your editor use your voice clone to update those. That’s super powerful and awesome and you can just repost it on your social media and see how it performs.

Now, the third step is to go even further. So my brother who has all these walkthroughs of all these beautiful homes can have his video editor, his copywriter write the scripts, have him read it and publish those as different ads or different pieces of content specific to the platform. But it’s all dynamic based on his voice and the editor doing it himself.

This is a gamechanger for content.

Tool 6: HeyGen.com – AI Video Avatars

But what if you want a full AI video version of yourself?

So, this is AI video avatars, but you use the voice from 11 Labs to plug it in to make the whole thing work. Just so you know, I was anti-AI avatars. I was a full content creator. Somebody that’s like, “Hey, this is my art. This is my communication. This is organic. People don’t want this synthetic artistic content.”

My Perspective Changed

And then I was on a call with seven AI experts that I curated from social media. I literally go every week and I’m on this Zoom call and one of the guys asked me about my thoughts on AI avatars and I said I’m not a fan. And he goes, “Funny because all the content that you saw that I put out there, that’s my AI avatar.”

Oh, my personal opinion of this had to change. Those are those moments in life where you got to make sure that something you believe is not holding you back.

When to Use AI Avatars

If you don’t want or don’t feel comfortable speaking on camera, guess what? The second best thing is an AI avatar. Now, you might say, “Well, that looks kind of weird and clunky.” Today it does, but it won’t in the future. And now you have no reason not to be serving your market.

And when you say, “Well, nobody wants to watch that.” Well, guess what? I grew up on He-Man and Astro Boy. The future is how good is the content, not does the person actually shoot their own content. It’s not there yet. Again, this is still me, but I’m not disputing it like I did before.

How to Use HeyGen in Your Business

And here’s how you use it in your business to make a lot of money. Use ChatGPT to write a script of you saying something powerful that can help somebody. Then go into Hey Jen, choose your avatar and language, which is your own, and then export a ready to post video.

Isn’t that wild? It’s still you talking to the camera, but it didn’t take your time to shoot that because your editors could do it on your behalf.

Tool 7: ChatGPT Voice Mode – Your AI Thinking Partner

So, now that the content engine is running and converting to leads, this next one is one of my favorites.

The idea of hands-free ideation, problem solving, essentially using it as a therapist, thinking out loud, getting out of your head and into words is so powerful.

Real-World Strategic Use

The other day I was struggling with a massive strategic decision. And I went on a run and the cool part about voice mode is you can have it on your phone but in your AirPod. So I could talk to it while I was running and my phone was in my pocket.

And at the end of that 45 minute run, it told me exactly what I knew I needed to do that I didn’t want to do. Like that’s the crazy part is like a lot of people pretend not to know. They pretend that they shouldn’t do this thing when at the end of the day good friends will just be like you know what you got to do and you’re like oh I was scared you were going to say that.

AI did the same thing for me but it gave it to me with confidence. It gave me the numbers to make the decision clear.

Why This Is So Powerful

It just becomes a real time cleaner way to communicate strategies, issues, challenges that’s way faster to get an action completed. You using it is next level. Your whole freaking team using it is going to make your business a lot of money.

How to Use ChatGPT Voice Mode Effectively

So here’s a simple example that’s going to change the way you solve problems in your business.

Step 1: Set the Parameters

First off, you need to tell it to stop being too nice. So that’s where you want to say, “Hey, challenge me. Be my mentor. Make sure that my ideas are bulletproof. Keep asking me questions you feel like we get there.”

Step 2: Give It a Framework

Then you want to give it a challenge. But when you ask it, so if you’re having to make a decision about like what do I need to work on to fix my business, give it the language around theory of constraints, which is TOC.

TOC is a problem-solving strategy to figure out how to increase throughput within your business. Once it knows that, it’s going to ask you questions about your marketing and your sales and your delivery.

Step 3: Provide Data and Constraints

Then you can give it the data that it can use and then tell you what areas you should look at. Then I want you to ask it, well give me five examples of how I could fix this problem with the resources I have and give it the constraint.

See, if you don’t give the AI the constraints, it won’t know how to solve the problem.

Step 4: Rank Solutions

Then it’s going to give you the answers and you tell it to rank it based on the amount of time you have and the people on your team and what you’re trying to create over the next 5 years.

And having AI be a thought partner for strategic decisions using the framework I just taught is going to make you a ton of money.

Tool 8: Precision.co – Data-Driven Decision Making

Now that communication is super clear and AI is solving your biggest problems, let’s talk about the data-driven decisions.

Precision is built by one of my good buddies, Matt Burlac. He’s also a portfolio company. Because data is how you make decisions. And if you don’t have a tool, then how do you know what scorecards to look at, flags to figure out if there’s any weirdness, or to tell you what’s the one action that matters? Precision does all that for you.

How We Use Precision

And we use it in all of my companies to make sure that every leader is making the right decision based on the data that they’re looking at and nobody’s trying to like come up with creative problems that don’t exist.

So, every morning at 8 a.m. we get the KPIs, the key performance indicators, and one clear move to improve those numbers. There’s fewer dashboards, and it’s way easier for everybody in the team to win. Focusing on the right numbers is going to give you the highest impact for pulling on the right lever.

How to Use Precision in Your Business

So, here’s a quick example on how you can use it yourself. Essentially, you connect all your CRM information, all your billing information, all your marketing and ad platform. Then it will create a CEO weekly scorecard for you based on your business and your best practices.

And then when you turn on the anomaly alerts, it’ll actually post to Slack anything that it finds that it thinks you should go and spend some time on. Then it allows you to monitor your whole business with a one-page dashboard that shows just the KPIs that everybody should be focusing on.

The Power of Data Clarity

And just like that, you know exactly what matters in your business. Most businesses don’t know what numbers to look at. Even if they’re looking at the numbers, they don’t know what’s good based on their industry. And even if they’re doing all that, they don’t know actually how to fix the number in the business to actually grow the business.

Precision helps you do all that with one tool.

Tool 9: Fyxer.ai – Your AI Chief of Staff

Now that you have your numbers looking good, let’s learn how to multiply yourself without spending any extra money.

Now, it’s fyxer.ai. They probably put on the screen somewhere, but that tool essentially is your AI ops assistant that handles calendar, travel, vendors, wrangling, SOPs, follow-ups. It’s essentially like a modern-day chief of staff.

And as the guy who wrote the book, Buy Back Your Time, this is one that’s near and dear to my heart because I knew at some point that low-level assistant role was going to be automated through AI. Now, I don’t think it gets rid of that person because a lot of communication with the world is very human, but it’ll help that person get everything done automatically.

How to Use Fyxer Today

So, here’s a simple example on how you can use it today.

Import Your Playbooks

First off, import all your playbooks. These are all your standard operating procedures. Some people call them manuals. Essentially, it’s the your way your company works. Grab all those documents, wherever they may be, and import them into the tool.

Assign Inbox Ownership

The next thing is you want to assign ownership to the inbox. So, you need to give it access to your inbox so it can move all these things forward on your behalf.

Weekly Digest

The next thing, and it’s really cool, is you get a weekly digest of all the stuff it’s been doing and all the exceptions that it didn’t know how to route so you can deal with them directly.

Usually, like I said, you would have your executive assistant do all these tasks. But with Fixer, essentially, it can do it for you. Most people don’t have an EA cuz they don’t know what they would give them to do.

Tool 10: Gamma.app – Visual Communication Tool

So now that your inbox is taken care of, great. Now the next tool is a game changer for all the leaders in your company.

This thing takes all these crazy ideas, all these words, and creates visual outputs. I’m talking decks and docs and web pages, essentially all your words into created designs. Humans learn through pictures. Okay? That’s what we see in our minds, not words.

The Power of Visual Communication

So, for example, back in the day, we used to put everything, all our strategies, all our priorities in a Google doc. But the problem is in meetings, nobody was leaning in. We took that same document asked gamma to visualize it and now all of a sudden people are paying attention because we’re going through it slide by slide and there is a picture communicating what we said is a priority.

That alone is worth the price of the product.

How to Use Gamma

Here’s a simple example that if you want to try just to see how it could work, just go in there and write the prompt, watch it autogenerate the layouts, the charts, the callouts. Essentially, it does it all for you with very little information. Imagine if you actually gave it a full document with instructions.

Cool part is that you can then take that and export it to a PDF where you can click through or even publish it to the web as a web page.

Tool 11: BuddyPro.ai – Your Company’s AI Brain

Okay, so now that you visualize your information and the decks are clean, now let’s build your company brain.

Buddy ProAI is another one of my portfolio companies and it is super freaking cool. What it becomes is essentially the brain for your business. Why? Because you know all this stuff. You have beliefs, you have strategies, you have experience, you have frameworks, you have all these things that you’ve collected over the years and when somebody comes to you with a problem, you give them the answer.

The Future of Knowledge Sharing

What if all of that was captured and anybody at any time of the day could actually talk to it and get the answer you would give it? That’s the power of Buddy Pro.

In the future, you’ll be able to license those brains from other companies. Think about the culture at Netflix, the product design from Apple, or the brand creation from Coca-Cola. Do you see how cool this gets?

How to Scale Your Knowledge

So scaling your business requires scaling your knowledge.

Load Everything

The first step is to load everything you got. I’m talking if you can extract your email knowledge, extract your social media knowledge, extract all the internal trainings, extract everything and give it to it. It will take all that information and make sense of it.

Categorize Your Beliefs

Then you want to categorize all your beliefs into buckets because your beliefs drives the way it guides the answers.

Personalization

The cool thing about Buddy Pro is it also takes the context of who’s asking the question and it creates like a personalization on top of their question and they can add a bunch of stuff so that they get the answer specific to them.

So imagine if every client that you’ve got, you load their context into this so that when they send a question in, it knows all the things they’ve bought from you. It knows all the times they’ve reached out to you. If there was recorded calls, it has all those calls to use as information to actually give them the right answer.

Applications

The interface is as simple as using ChatGPT for your clients. This will change your support challenges, your customer success issues, your coaching, your training. You can use it for your clients and you can use it for your team.

Tool 12: Vapi – Voice API for Business

So now you’ve got all your knowledge and you made it accessible to anybody on your team or your clients. This next one is taking the future of business to another level by changing the experience for all your clients.

Vapi, which stands for voice API. Essentially, voice is like a completely different version of like your atlas where your atlas is very focused on helping you make money. The voice API is essentially building apps that use voice for your business.

Real-World Example

You can use it for anything. There’s actually a funny example of this 20-year-old kid that used it to call all the used Rolex stores to negotiate a panda watch on his behalf. It did all the calls. The voice they used was a like New York Italian guy and gave it the scripts for it to negotiate, log all of the price confirmations from those negotiations into a spreadsheet and essentially allowed them to sort by the least amount of money for that panda with the right specs.

It was wild to watch. Just Google it, you’ll find it.

Scale Without Adding Headcount

Essentially, you can scale outbound sales, inbound support calls without adding any new hires.

Simple Implementation Example

So, here’s a simple example. Imagine you have a team of people doing support calls and you just want to like help the person faster. So I want you to use Vapi to take the call, identify the core problem the customer is having, try to answer it on the call using the AI and if it can’t, real simple, just redirect it to the current team that you have so that the human can solve the problem.

And then what you do is you’re just trying to get it better and better where it doesn’t have to route to the human anymore because every time it does, you take that information, you update the prompt and then it can do it in the future without having to do the routing.

Do you see how you can like start there and then slowly remove people from your team and retrain them to go do other stuff?

Voice Is the Future

Imagine how much time that’s going to buy back not just your time, but your whole team. The crazy thing about voice is that it is the preferred interface. I don’t want to fill out a form anymore. I’d rather just call a number and talk to AI cuz it’s so good now.

So, it’s not even to solve your current problems. It’s trying to find new ways to make money using voice.

Conclusion: Take Action This Week

So, there was a lot of tools I just went over, but I want you to just pick one tool and ship it this week. Put in your calendar, 90minute block, go in there and use it. If you stack that win and do that every week, you’ll watch your revenue grow in your business.

I understand keeping on top of AI is really hard. And I know that you’re like, “Thank God this content exists, or I wouldn’t even know where to start.” But every one of us can learn it.

The Future Is AI-First

The future of business is AI plus your business. It’s putting AI first. If you don’t decide to say I am an AI powered company, then unfortunately in 3 or 4 years there’s only going to be one winner. It’s the company that’s using AI.

So don’t sleep on this. If this resonated with you, make it part of your culture. Integrate it into your teams. Use it on a daily basis and never stop cuz honestly every 60 days the whole thing is changing, accelerating, and getting better.

Now those tools will definitely help you grow your business.