The AI tools I actually use as a Startup Product Executive in February 2025 - Bryce York

Last updated: February 2025.

Perplexity has mostly replaced Google for me, and their recent Deep Research addition is even more invaluable!
ChatGPT – my preferred chat. Deep Research is genuinely remarkable and incredibly valuable. I think the world is going to be quite a different place when this quality is readily available for free or even in the basic $20/mo options.
Granola – note-taking meets AI. It’s fantastic. After 10 years of handwritten notes, this is the first time I’ve changed up that behavior! Huge fan.
NotebookLM – I use this anytime something is too long or in a format I’m not in the mood for and convert it into a podcast. Be sure to take advantage of the customize option to provide context and get a tailored result to your situation & needs. The chat tools are also quite good, but I rarely use them at the moment.
Snipd – The only way I listen to podcasts allows me to make “highlights” by capturing snippets automatically with a simple double tap of my AirPods. Protip: I also use it to listen to the podcasts generated by NotebookLM since I can capture highlights, queue up multiple episodes, and listen to them without keeping the browser open or anything annoying like that.

Claude – At the moment, I’m using ChatGPT more, but if I plan to use the written content in some way, I will go to Claude instead. I much prefer its writing side and have more success with getting it to write more like I do.
Reader by Readwise – I mostly use its non-AI capabilities b,ut when I want something to be read by AI, it’s my go-to (I find it’s better with PDFs and articles than ElevenReader, which seems to end up filled with random line breaks that mess up the flow. And the voices in Reader are basically just as good as ElevenLabs)
Descript – video editing that’s as easy as document editing
Midjourney – still my favorite place to generate images, but i don’t need to do it that often (but generally for slides)
Luma Labs – image to video (generally for slides)
Kling.ai – image to video (generally for slides)
Ollama & LM Studio – whenever I want to run models locally on my computer, I download the model with Ollama and run it with LM Studio, which provides a nice ChatGPT-style UI. I use gollama to run ollama models in LM Studio, but you can totally just use LM Studio directly.
Open-Source Slack AI – I’m a little biased, but I quite like the free Slack AI alternative I built to summarize threads, summarize channel content, and help you catch up after being out of the office.

Apollo – local LLMs on my phone, not often needed but great on the plane, and I’m glad I have it just in case I need it.
Superhuman – their AI is handy when I have writer’s block and pretty decent at writing in my style. But I really don’t write many emails, so I don’t actually use it all that often.
Grammarly – I’ve been a paying customer for over a decade and use it all the time, but it goes here because even though it’s an S-tier product, it’s not gotten much better for me since AI went mainstream.

Apple Intelligence – the best thing about the new Siri and Apple Intelligence is the pretty screen effect…