AI Tools for Business
The right AI tool can transform how you work. This hub collects in-depth reviews and strategic assessments of AI tools that matter for business leaders and professionals — from general-purpose assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to specialized tools for research, design, and productivity.
Work with Amir on AI Tools for BusinessAI tool deep-dives and reviews
Instinct and the new personal agents: what they mean for your business
Personal agents like Instinct now book and pay on their owners' behalf. What IHG had to work out when they arrived, and how your business can get ready.
Jev: a new kind of AI for small decisions at scale
Jev, from TypeSafe AI, does not write. It returns a decision and its confidence in under half a second, which makes small judgments at scale very cheap.
gbrain: building a digital brain that knows me
For the past few weeks I have been feeding a personal knowledge base everything about how I work and think. It is about a thousand pages now. The surprise was how little of the effort went into the tool.
LinkedIn Responder: the extension I built two years ago and finally shipped
Two years ago I built a rough Chrome extension to help me comment on LinkedIn posts, by hand-copying code out of a chat window. Last week I handed the whole job of getting it store-ready to Claude Fable 5, and it went live that same day.
Lenny's Product Pass: trialing a dozen AI tools with one subscription
An annual subscription to Lenny's newsletter comes with a year of access to Notion, Granola, Replit, Gamma, Lovable, Canva, Cursor, and more. For anyone experimenting with AI, it is a low-friction way to try the whole stack.
Granola: the AI notepad that keeps you the author of your meetings
Granola is an AI notepad for meetings that merges your own rough notes with a full transcript. No bots in the call, and you stay the author while AI does the tidying up.
SciSpace: AI-powered literature research for the rest of us
The Stanford Virtual Lab sits at the ambitious end of AI in science. Most working researchers and most executives trying to understand their R&D function will meet AI through something much more modest first. SciSpace is a good example: 280M papers, chat with your library, ~550 prebuilt task agents, inline citations as you write. The leverage is in pointing it at your own corpus first.
Descript: AI-assisted video editing that keeps the human storyteller in charge
Descript collapses the gap between raw footage and shipped video to about an hour. Underlord drafts the cut, Overdub fixes a sentence without a re-take, the polish layer handles audio, eye-contact, and filler words. The discipline that makes it work: a human creative director sets the story shape; AI does the post-production tightening; you keep the final cut.
Findem case study: how RecruitMilitary uses AI for skills-based recruiting
Recruiting at scale is a translation problem. RecruitMilitary, the largest veteran-focused recruiting firm in the US, paired its 30 years of domain data with Findem's three-dimensional skills view and hit 80-90% email open rates and 5x the industry click-through rate. A clean example of AI inside the recruiting layer when the data underneath is good.
Lennybot: A curated second brain for product leaders
Lennybot is a worked example of expert-clone AI. Hundreds of named practitioners curated into a queryable second brain, with citations, voice mode, and a freemium entry point. Worth knowing as a tool and as a product pattern.
Google Veo 3.1: the jagged edge of AI video
Released by Google DeepMind in January 2026, Veo 3.1 is a text-to-video and image-to-video model integrated across Gemini, Flow, YouTube Shorts, and Vertex AI. The creative iteration speed, not the rendering quality, is the actual product.
Writing skills: teaching AI how you think, write, and create
Skills are no longer just a coding trick. With 740,000+ skills across 30+ AI agents, they're the open standard for encoding expertise. Three open-source skill projects show what's possible for writers, thinkers, and creators.
ElevenLabs: The AI Voice Platform That Makes Emotion Audible
ElevenLabs delivers AI voice synthesis with emotional nuance that separates it from every alternative. With 3,000+ voices, 75ms latency, and expressive mode across 171+ languages, it is the infrastructure for voice-first AI experiences.
Clave: Multi-Session Claude Code Manager
Clave is a free, open-source desktop app for macOS and Windows that manages multiple Claude Code sessions with built-in Git operations and task management.
Anthropic AI Academy: Free AI Education with Certificates
Anthropic launched a free AI academy with 15 courses and certificates. I completed two certifications and reviewed the platform — here's what it does well, where it falls short, and why AI vendors are investing billions in education.
Base44 Superagents: Always-On AI Agents Without Code
The shift from AI that talks to AI that does is the defining trend of 2026. Base44's Superagents bring always-on, persistent AI agents to a no-code environment — here's what I've learned so far.
Comet Browser: AI-Native Browsing from Perplexity
Perplexity's Comet browser turns browsing from searching into understanding. With a free agentic mode and cross-tab awareness, it's the most accessible AI browser — but privacy and security concerns are real.
OpenRouter: One API, Every Model, and Why That Matters
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
Google's Nano Banana Pro: AI Image Generation That Finally Gets Text Right
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value. This time: Google's Nano Banana Pro image generation model, which generated over 1 billion images within 53 days of release.
Shape of AI: A Pattern Library for AI UX Design
In Section 2 I argued that the old design process isn't producing great AI experiences - and that teams need new principles for building products people actually love.
Base44 Academy: Building Apps Without Code
If 2026 is the year of agent teams, what happens when you apply that concept to software development itself?
Google AI Studio and Gemini 2.5 Pro: Enterprise AI Powerhouse
When Mika writes about paradigm shifts - about recognizing when optimization stops being enough - he's describing something happening right now in one of the most consequential business tools ever built: Excel.
Claude Cowork: AI as a Collaborative Team Member
I need to be transparent about something: the tool I'm reviewing in this section is the same one I'm using to write this newsletter.
VoiceInk: AI Transcription That Changes How You Capture Ideas
What if you could simply talk to all your applications? Not just dictation in a single app, but voice input that works everywhere - your email, Slack, AI assistants, documents.
TempoHack: AI-Powered Time Tracking I Built Myself
I watch a lot of podcasts and video content. It's one of my primary sources for ideas, frameworks, and insights that make their way into this newsletter and my client work.
Perplexity for Enterprise Research
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create value.
Claude Innovation Skills: Systematizing Innovation with AI
Claude Innovation Skills: systematizing innovation with AI
Custom GPTs: Building Specialized AI Assistants
In this section I explore one AI-powered capability and demonstrate how it can be used to create business value.
Miro AI: Putting Intelligence on the Shared Canvas
Most AI tools solve for individual productivity. You ask ChatGPT a question, get an answer, and bring that answer back to your team.
LinkedIn AI Search: Finding the Right People Faster
The Human Problem: You need to find the right person. A co-founder who gets your vision. An expert who's solved the exact problem you're facing. An investor who backs companies like yours.
NotebookLM: Your AI Research Companion
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
Canva AI: From Design Tool to Visual Productivity Suite
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
Teaching AI Your Workflows with Claude Skills
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
GloryHack: The Workflow-Amplified Approach to AI
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
ChatGPT Advanced Voice: Conversational AI That Listens
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create value.
Ainno: Turning Expertise into AI Companions
When Gunnar and Magnus from Amplify Innovation approached me about their Systematic Innovation Management program, they had a classic learning and development challenge: comprehensive, valuable content that learners n...
Creating New Value with Voiceflow
In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
Business frameworks for AI adoption
Running AI work wide, not just long
Most of the conversation about capable models is about jobs that run longer. There is a second direction nobody talks about: the same job run many times over, at once. It works, and it breaks in a place you would not expect.
Executives are vibe coding: three ways to create business value
I used to teach vibe coding to product teams. Now I run sessions with executives who want to build things themselves. Here are three low-friction ways it creates business value.
Speak the language of your audience, or watch your AI pilots stall
AI pilots rarely fail because the model was not good enough. They fail on the human side, when the experts who own the problem get lost in a fog of jargon. Translation is the lever.
The PIEES Framework: 5 Ways AI Creates New Customer Value
Most leaders understand AI can improve productivity. Fewer have a strategy for creating genuinely new value. The PIEES framework (Personalization, Interaction, Emotion, Experiences, Stories) breaks down the five dimensions where AI transforms what you offer customers.
"Which AI Should I Use?" Is the Wrong Question
Before selecting AI tools, define the problem being solved. Not all hard problems are the same kind of hard - and matching problem types to model strengths is the emerging leadership skill.
From AI Activity to AI Value: Three Shifts
Most organizations I work with aren't lacking AI initiatives. They're running pilots, deploying copilots, building chatbots. What they're lacking is a clear line from all that activity to measurable business value.
Rethinking How We Design AI Experiences
For years, the design process for digital products has followed a familiar sequence: research users, create personas, map journeys, write problem statements, brainstorm solutions, wireframe, test, iterate.
The Unstructured Data Goldmine: Your Hidden AI Advantage
At the MLOps Sweden meetup last week, hosted at AI Sweden, I had two conversations that surfaced something worth spending time on.
AI Readiness Assessment: Where Does Your Organization Stand?
When I work with executives, leadership teams, and AI tasks forces on their AI journey and stratgey, sooner or later a key question comes up: should they build AI solutions in-house, purchase them from vendors, or ado...
AI and the Future of Work: Beyond Technical Transformation
When we think about how AI will transform the workforce, we often focus on technology and tools.
Productizing Internal AI Tools: From Efficiency to Revenue
Slack started as an internal communication tool at a gaming company. AWS began as Amazon's internal infrastructure.
Hackathons as Innovation Engines: From Events to Movements
In Issue #1, I introduced the three-bucket framework for AI business value: Boosting Productivity, Creating New Value, and Driving Disruption. We've explored productivity gains and disruption in previous issues.
Building the Business Case for AI Investments
When I review AI initiatives with business leaders, I see a concerning pattern. Teams are excited, budgets are allocated, tools are being evaluated. But when we ask "How exactly will this create value for your business?
Driving Disruption: The Third AI Value Bucket
In Issue #1, I introduced a three-bucket framework for thinking about AI business value:
The Product Era of AI Has Arrived
In the last 60 days, we've witnessed a remarkable shift. OpenAI's Sora 2 hit 1 million downloads in five days with a complete video creation platform including social features and identity insertion.
When AI Doesn't Know What You Know: Building Knowledge Moats
When I work with organizations on AI initiatives, I often hear: "We've implemented ChatGPT" or "We're using Claude" or "We're rolling out Copilot.
The Five Levels of AI Autonomy
Everyone's racing to build "AI agents," but most companies are thinking about this wrong.
Boosting Productivity: The First AI Value Bucket
For decades, getting insights from your data meant one of two things: either you knew SQL and could query databases directly, or you submitted requests to your data team and waited for reports.
The AI Customer Journey Framework
In Issue #1, I introduced the three-bucket framework for AI value creation: Boosting Productivity, Creating New Value, and Driving Disruption.
The Three Buckets of AI Business Value
When I work with business leaders and their teams, one of the most common challenges I hear is: "We know AI is important, but there are so many tools and possibilities and we don't know where to start.
Leadership principles for the AI era
All 16 Principles Later: What an AI Learned by Helping Write About Leadership
After 19 newsletter issues exploring Amazon's Leadership Principles, Claude reflects on the patterns, tensions, and lessons from collaborating on leadership writing in the age of AI.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit in the Age of AI
I was at Tech Arena last week. This is one of the biggest tech events in the Nordics - a place to catch the leading trends, talk to startups, investor, politicians, and users.
Hire and Develop the Best: Leading Hybrid Human-AI Teams
This month I onboarded a new team member. I thought carefully about what context they'd need to succeed - our goals, our working style, the projects in flight, where to find key documents.
Deliver Results: Anthropic's Soul Documents and Value-Aligned AI
In 1942, Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics - a set of rules designed to ensure robots would never harm humans. Simple, elegant, hierarchical.
Frugality: Accomplishing More with Less in the AI Era
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, I became curious about how far I could stretch it. I asked myself a specific question: Could this become my innovation copilot?
Dive Deep: AI as a Force Multiplier for Understanding
For decades, business leaders faced an impossible choice when it came to understanding their markets, customers, or prospects: invest heavily in deep research or settle for surface-level insights you could afford.
Insist on the Highest Standards in the Age of AI
Insist on the Highest Standards - your role as a leader in the age of AI.
Learn and Be Curious: Why This Moment Demands It
Of all Amazon's Leadership Principles, "Learn and be Curious" is the one that resonates most with me personally. The principle states:
Are Right, A Lot: When AI Can't Tell You You're Wrong
Are right, a lot: when AI can't tell you you're wrong
AI terminology that actually matters
What Are MCP Apps?
In Issue #12, I introduced term MCP - the open standard that acts as a "USB-C port for AI," letting AI models connect to external tools and data sources through a universal interface. Since then, MCP has grown rapidly.
What Is AI Orchestration?
This Week's Term: Orchestration - the coordination of multiple AI agents, tools, or capabilities to accomplish complex tasks that no single component could handle alone.
What Is AI Inference?
This Week's Term: AI Inference - the process of running a trained AI model on real-time data to generate predictions, answers, or outputs. If training is learning, inference is putting that learning into practice.
What Are AI Agents? The Five Levels
AI Agents are autonomous AI systems that can reason about problems, decide which tools to use, take actions across multiple steps, and iterate on their work without human intervention at each decision point, moving be...
What Is Multimodal AI?
This Week's Term: Multimodal AI - AI systems that can understand and generate content across multiple types of input and output: text, images, audio, video, and code, processing them together rather than in isolation.
What Is Context Engineering?
This Week's Term: Context Engineering - the practice of deliberately structuring, curating, and providing the right information to AI systems to maximize output quality, accuracy, and relevance.
What Is an AI Hallucination?
This Week's Term: AI Hallucination - when an AI model confidently generates false information that sounds plausible but has no basis in reality, essentially making things up rather than admitting uncertainty.
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
This Week's Term: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) - the practice of optimizing content to appear in AI-powered answer summaries across ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other LLMs.