Best AI tools for business
Learn about the best AI tools for note-taking, customer support, design, HR, and file management.
AI set the world on fire for the past couple of years. As the smoke clears, we’re left with hundreds of tools that can improve how we work. Whether you're an AI evangelist or tend to avoid tech altogether, you might be surprised at just how much AI can benefit your business.
We know those popular AI tools—whether it’s AI art generators like MidJourney or chat assistants like ChatGPT. But, the real power lies in AI tools that integrate into the day-to-day, improving unavoidable operations. From meetings to file management, AI can increase your productivity.
Then you can focus on what matters most: growing your business. Below, we cover five essential categories and the AI tools that can keep you ahead of your competitors.
Best AI tool for business meetings: Otter AI
- Best for: Sales teams, marketing professionals, and teachers or professors
- Brands that trust them: IBM and UCLA
- Why you need it: You want to focus on your meeting and not on note taking. Use Otter to get transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and answers about what happened in your meetings.
Managing business meetings, providing real-time caption generation, and serving as a notetaker for in-person and virtual settings, Otter AI is your virtual secretary. It even received an 8.0/10 score based on CNET’s testing.
Some of its more memorable features include the ability to tag speakers. Tag everyone when they start talking, and then Otter AI will tag them based on their voice throughout the meeting. Don’t expect error-free transcripts (not even a skilled human transcriber can promise that), but do expect a best-in-class performance for a meeting transcriber.
Pricing
Otter AI has flexible, affordable pricing, with four tiers and monthly and annual options. If you want to try Otter’s Business plan, they offer a 7-day free trial. The only drawback in terms of value is if you have high transcription needs. You’re capped in the business plan to 6,000 transcriptions and 4-hour-long conversations.
Best AI tool for customer support: Bland AI
- Best for: Call centers, customer service reps
- Brands that trust them: PayPal and Sears
- Why you need it: Offer automated customer interactions with AI agents that learn from past conversations and improve over time.
Bland AI offers customer management over phone calls with remarkably human-sounding AI-powered agents. You can also pull campaign analytics to improve agent calls. You can use Github for Bland AI “cookbooks” or, for no-code options, integrate with Zapier to automate. Their AI agents are offered in any language, with different voice options, including cloned voices. Using Natural Language Processing, Bland AI aims to keep conversations sounding natural.
Pricing
The best part about the cost of Bland AI? Unlimited scale. Bland costs $0.09/minute for connected calls. Bland AI does offer enterprise solutions as well as volume discounts.
Best AI tool for interface design: Figma
- Best for: Design teams, UX/UI professionals, remote web designers
- Brands that trust them: Crunchyroll and Spotify
- Why you need it: Streamline your design process with an intuitive, fast, and collaborative tool.
Figma is a go-to tool for designers and developers, offering AI-powered enhancements that make designing efficient. With simple, straightforward sharing and search features, Figma helps design teams work together.
Figma collaboration is live. Like a Google Doc, you can see when someone else is working and follow their cursor around. This makes Figma ideal for remote teams that value staying connected.
Figma now uses AI to understand the semantic meaning and context behind your searches, designed to return the most relevant components and assets, even if your search terms don’t exactly match their names. If your team is working with lots of assets, finding them in Figma is easy with their AI-powered search.
Figma also offers a desktop application, following the trend in modern productivity tools. Its strong, active community makes it easier for users to quickly advance their skills and become power users on their desktop and web applications.
Pricing
Figma offers a free tier and charges per seat, monthly or annually, for teams.
Best AI tool for HR support: Eightfold AI
- Best for: HR teams, recruiters
- Brands that trust them: Bayer and Box
- Why you need it: Eightfold's AI-driven insights cut through the noise and help you find and retain the best employees.
Eightfold AI simplifies the entire HR process, from hiring to managing talent. This powerful tool analyzes candidate data to help you make smarter decisions, matching applicants to roles based on skills, experience, and potential. Beyond recruitment, Eightfold enables companies to retain talent by analyzing performance data and offering personalized growth paths.
Pricing
Eightfold AI uses an annual subscription model based on the number of employees, with volume discounts available.
Best AI tool for file search: Desktop Docs
- Best for: Media professionals, business owners, students, content creators
- Used by people who work at: Zillow, Meta
- Why you need it: Faster image and video search. Search files by their content instead of trying to remember their file names.
File management should be simple. Desktop Docs offers AI-powered search to help you quickly find, edit, and export media files. Instead of remembering where you saved a file and what you named it, Desktop Docs locates a file based on its content. It does this by indexing your media files based on the subjects, objects, actions, and text in the files. Everything is stored locally on your computer and never uploaded online, keeping all your files and searches private to you.
Pricing
For a one-time payment of $24.99, Desktop Docs provides a lifetime of simplified file search.
AI tools are transforming the way we work, offering efficiency, scalability, and time saving across various industries. From organizing files to improving business meetings, there's an AI tool for every business owner's needs.
