The AI Tools Your Competitors Aren't Using Yet
Phil Siefke
While everyone's talking about ChatGPT, there's a whole ecosystem of AI tools flying under the radar. These are the tools that give you an unfair advantage — the ones your competitors don't know about yet. Here's what you should be using right now.
Perplexity: Research That Actually Works
Perplexity is what Google should have been. Instead of giving you a list of links, it gives you actual answers with citations. Need to research a market, understand a competitor, or find specific data? Perplexity does in one query what used to take an hour of searching.
The real power is in follow-up questions. You can have a conversation with it, drilling down into topics and getting increasingly specific answers. It's like having a research assistant who never gets tired and always cites their sources.
Use it for competitive intelligence, market research, and staying current on industry trends. The time savings alone make it worth the subscription, but the quality of insights you get is what really matters.
Claude: The AI That Actually Thinks
Claude is better than ChatGPT for complex reasoning tasks. It's more careful, more nuanced, and better at understanding context. When you need to analyze a situation, draft a strategy, or work through a complicated problem, Claude is the tool to use.
It's particularly good at understanding and working with long documents. Upload a 50-page contract, a competitor's annual report, or a market research study, and Claude can analyze it, answer questions about it, and help you extract the insights that matter.
The Projects feature lets you create dedicated workspaces with custom instructions and knowledge bases. Set up a project for each major area of your business and you've essentially created a team of specialized AI assistants.
Eleven Labs: Voice That Sounds Human
If you're creating any kind of audio content — podcasts, video voiceovers, audiobooks, phone systems — Eleven Labs is a game changer. The voice quality is so good that most people can't tell it's AI-generated.
You can clone your own voice or create custom voices for different use cases. Need a professional narrator for training videos? A friendly voice for customer service? A authoritative tone for presentations? You can generate all of them.
The real advantage is speed and cost. What used to require hiring voice actors, booking studio time, and dealing with revisions can now be done in minutes for a fraction of the cost. And the quality is often better than what you'd get from a budget voice actor.
Make + AI: Automation That Thinks
Make (formerly Integromat) is an automation platform that connects different apps and services. When you combine it with AI tools, you can build workflows that would have required custom software development a few years ago.
Example: automatically monitor competitor websites, use AI to analyze changes, summarize the insights, and send you a daily briefing. Or: collect customer feedback from multiple sources, use AI to categorize and analyze it, and generate weekly reports with actionable recommendations.
The learning curve is steeper than tools like Zapier, but the power and flexibility are worth it. Once you understand how to build Make scenarios, you can automate almost anything in your business.
The AI tools that matter aren't the ones everyone's talking about — they're the ones that solve real problems in your business. Start with these four and you'll be ahead of 95% of your competitors. The question is: how fast can you implement them?
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How AI Changes the Game for Small Businesses →Phil Siefke
Consumer advocate and business strategist helping people understand the systems working against them — and how to fight back.
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