AI for Non-Techies 🛠️: Top Tools for Search, Agent Building, Academic Paper Reviews & Sales Automation

💼 Facilitating repetitive routine daily tasks with AI to reduce friction. AI for Non-Techies: AI Tools for Work, part 3 of the series.

Hey Everyone,

This article will be a variety of lists of AI tools and miscellaneous resources. I’m looking more into applied AI tools to help us be more effective and productive at work.

This post won’t UNLOCK to free readers ever, it has too much original research and specialized content useful to the right learner. Frankly it has proprietary research I’ve done that I don’t want to share with just anyone. In my survey of the space I’m starting to take a deeper look into things like academic research & writing and which are the best tools to learn about building AI Agents and getting them deployed into production and real-world scenarios. I also looked into Sales automation and AI tools for customer acquisition.

AI for Non-Techies: AI Tools for Work 🔎

I don’t claim to be an AI tool expert (or consultant, coach or course builder) and I’m not constantly tinkering with these.

However I do have some pragmatic ideas and curation of tools to share. My hope is this series will give you the motivation to start finding the best tools yourself for your work needs. In this article I will also list the best aggregators for you to find the best tools yourself.

Automate the Things you Do the Most Frequently - The Big Three

• Meetings

• Emails

• Search & Research (including academic paper reviews)

• AI agents, automations and assistants

• Business development and customer acquisition

Today’s article will focus on many Search and research tools as well as touch upon AI Agents builders and list a large variety of productivity enhancing AI tools.

Update on Consumer Generative AI B2C Apps

The third edition of a16z’s guide on B2C Gen AI came out on August 21st. There were some major differences from last time (about seven months later - Jan to July). Consumer adoption is just one indication that an AI Tool is decent or useful. Often they are more on the entertainment spectrum than the utility side, still it’s worth noting some patterns in adoption.

I definately care more about utility than entertainment in the end, but it’s good to know what’s trending.

As of July, 2024 Data

So based upon changes of a16z’s Top 50 list, these are some conclusions we can make with regards to consumer adoption at scale: (think of this list as entertainment mostly)

Biggest Winners

• Perplexity

• Claude

• Suno AI (and text to music as a whole)

• Luma AI (text and image to animation and video)

• Spicy Chat (huge library of chatbots)

• Crushon.AI (Another NSFW Chatbot tool)

• Yodayo AI (AI enabled anime fandom)

We have to mention these lists are very changeable from month to month as consumer behaviors change rapidly with rew defined category winners outside players like ChatGPT and ElevenLabs.

That you should Know

• Blackbox AI (virtual coding companion)

• Civit AI- hub for open-source generative AI

• Liner (still very useful)

The Older list based on January, 2024 Data

From a16z’s March article using January data, you will notice a lot of churn on these lists:

New Trending AI Tools

• Luma AI

• Viggle (Trending: AI characters for memes)

• SeaArt AI

• Udio (also text to music, a good competitor with Suno.AI)

• Hix.AI (factual Q&A)

• Vidnoz (Create AI videos in 1 min)

• Guath AI (best homework helper for students)

• Coze (chatbot development platform specializing in no-code)

• Doubao (chatbot by ByteDance)

• AI Novelist

Claude and Perplexity are growing faster than ChatGPT as of July, 2024

• Don’t look now, but Claude and Perplexity finally have moment compared with ChatGPT that claims over 100 million weekly users.

Source.

Still Early Days for AI Tools and AI Agents and Assistants: 2024 Snapshot

While there are obviously just a few big winners, it’s early days for all manners of AI tools, AI agents, and even frontier models and their capabilities.

There are so many AI tools, but a few really good ones for most use cases at work. I’m more confident in mid 2024 that the best have risen to the surface, we can begin to talk more about applied AI now, at least in a preliminary transient sense. For most AI enthusiasts we need applied evidence that this stuff can be useful.

This article will be most useful for Search and Agentic AI explorers and serious AI Tool enthusiasts (mostly in list form). This is at best a launch point for further research you take on yourself (nobody can do this for you). First let’s talk about how to find these tools:

🔧 How into AI Tools are you?

Top AI Tool Aggregators