Which AI Tool to Use for Which Job
There are so many AI tools now that picking one can feel like the hardest part. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and a new one every week, each one promising to do everything. In my first column I said I'd sort out which one to use for what, so here it is.
So here's where I land. Most owners need one chat tool, plus one more for reading documents. Everything else can wait.
For most jobs, one chat tool is enough
ChatGPT and Claude are the two I'd start with. Both have a free version, and both handle the everyday stuff well: a reply to a customer, a post for your Facebook page, a letter you need explained in plain English.
People ask me which one is better. In my experience the difference between them matters a lot less than getting good with one of them. I use both. I often get a first draft from ChatGPT, and I do most of my longer work in Claude. But if I were starting from zero, I'd pick either one and use it for every writing job for a month before even looking at a second.
The free versions are fine for learning. You'll know it's time to pay when you keep running out of messages in the middle of a busy day. ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro both cost $20 a month right now, going by each company's own pricing page. And as I said in my first column, keep customer details out of a free account.
Check what you already pay for
Before you buy anything, look at what your email plan already includes. If your business email runs on Google Workspace, your plan may already come with Gemini, Google's AI helper. If it runs on Microsoft 365, the same goes for Copilot.
What's included changes by plan and seems to change every few months, so log in and look rather than taking my word for it. The nice thing about these is that they sit right inside your email and documents. You can ask for a summary of a long email thread without copying anything anywhere.
For a pile of documents, use Gemini Notebook
This is the tool I wish more owners knew about. It used to be called NotebookLM, and Google renamed it Gemini Notebook in July. It's free with a Google account.
Here's how it works. You make a notebook and add your own documents to it: PDFs, web pages, Word files, Google Docs, even YouTube videos. The free plan takes up to 50 of them per notebook. Then you ask questions, and it answers from those documents, which basically means it has a lot less room to make things up. In my experience it also shows you where each answer came from, so you can go read the original yourself.
I used it this fall on an Amazon listing for a small manufacturer. Amazon had changed its rules for product titles two months earlier, and the advice online was a mix of old and new. So I put 58 web pages and nine YouTube tutorials about Amazon's rules into two notebooks and asked my questions there. Every answer pointed back to its source, which let me check the rule itself instead of trusting a summary.
You probably have a pile like that too. A few ideas:
· The manuals for your equipment, so you can ask how to fix the thing that's beeping
· Your insurance policy, so you can ask what it says about water damage
· Your lease, or the city's rules for signs and sidewalk seating
· The guidelines for a grant you're thinking about applying for
It won't replace your lawyer or your insurance agent. But it gets you to the right page fast, and you'll walk into that conversation with better questions.
A few more jobs, matched to a tool
· Something that happened recently: ask ChatGPT or Claude to search the web and show where it found the answer. Without a search, they only know what they learned up to a certain date.
· A picture for a post: ChatGPT can make one. The free version gives you a few a day.
· Notes from a staff huddle or a sales call: record it, then have it transcribed. Zoom, Google Meet and most phones can do that part now. I use Zoom for recordings of my own client meetings, then ask a chat tool for the action items. Zoom even offers one itself.
· A question about your numbers: ask in the chat tool, but check the math yourself before you act on it. It's good with words and numbers, but for important stuff make sure to get it double checked with either your own calculations or a second AI.
None of these needs a new subscription to get started.
Try this this week
Pick one chat tool and use it for every writing job this week, even the small ones. Then find one pile of documents you keep digging through, put five of them into a Gemini Notebook and ask it three questions. Open the source it points to for at least one answer, and see if it got it right.
Checking AI's work, which I promised last time, is coming up next. If you have a question about any of this, the contact page on my website reaches me directly.
Andrew Voskov
Cherry Pi AI, Fairfield
Marketing, bookkeeping and custom AI tools for small businesses
(641) 276-6999
