9 AI Tools You MUST Know In 2025 (Productivity, Audience Growth & More)

What were the best AI apps of 2024, the ones you should be using in your everyday life? Well, fear not. I'm going to give you the best AI apps of 2024 and call out some of the ones you should start using today to be more productive, to grow your audience, to actually start building products. All of that and more. Let's get into today's show. 2024 was the year of AI. Thousands and thousands of new AI apps being launched and some of them were not photo generated app store. Other things being launch creative tools that generated cool and funny photos. I wanted to give you a quick overview of some of the better 2024 consumer AI apps. So for the most part these are for personal use because it comes from a 16Z Andreessen and Howitz. This is why I need kip because I'm terrible at pronunciations. So a16z released their AI wrapped or unwrapped list for 2024. Basically they covered some of the best AI apps that have been launched over their last year over 2024. And for the most part they're consumer apps. Right. There are a lot of B2B app of data in terms of sales, customer support, success. These are much more for personal use, but even personal use for knowledge workers. So here's the list. I want to give you a quick overview and then I'm going to cover some of the ones that I want to call out that you can start to use in your everyday life. And so these are some of the best apps that have been launched in 2024. It comes from Adit Shiite. So thank you for putting this on Twitter. I bookmarked it and it goes through general assistance. How to get work done through productivity, how to build an audience, how to build a product, get creative, learn or and have fun. And I'm going to call out some of the ones in the productivity. I'm going to call out some of the ones and how to build an audience. Go through them. I want to call out one and build a product. I'm going to call out one and get creative. We've covered most of these on the podcast, but there's one there, Kriya, that I want to get into. Learn and grow. I want to cover Notebook LM because I think it was one of the best AI products launched last year and not many people are using it. We don't want to have fun now. We do want to have fun, but I'm going to skip these. I do. We used. We did a whole episode just on Grok. Because that is a lot of fun. But this was the list again. This is what I mean. It's like quite personal use. It's for like personal use for. You don't need to have your company sign off on these apps. You can go use them tomorrow and start to be much more productive, start to use AI in your everyday work. So let's get into some of the ones that I want to cover and some of the better ones that I think you could start using straight away. All right, let's start with productivity. Who doesn't want to be much more productive? So the first one I wanted to cover is I saw a lot of people actually tweeting about this one, which is Flow Voice. But basically it's Flow. And so what flow does is it actually. It actually integrates into your laptop and you can basically control all of your apps with voice. And so I want to give you a little bit of a preview here. Watch this in action to give you an example of like how this actually works and how it could be much more productive in how you do things. And here's how. Hey, S, you know me that 5 o' clock or actually, you know what, let's do, let's do 6pm yo, that's sick. Fire emoji. So, you know, very similar to Grammarly as Grammarly was to text. You can think of flow as the voice. So, you know, actually Grammarly would integrate in Slack and it could correct me when I make all my mistakes or integrate into all my different apps and correct me when I make mistakes. What flow does is actually integrates into all of your apps and then you can actually write back via just your voice and AI transcribing that voice versus having to do it via the old hands. Like that one for the keyboard. They should use that in the next video. Don't chop off the hands. That would be kind of brutal. That speaks to you. Blah, blah. Here's three things that make so unique. It gets named right Even on common ones like yours. It lets you edit. Pretty cool. Email. There's another cool. Actually you can actually edit things live. Here's a good example. So it integrates into Google Docs and you basically can translate this live to AI wherever you're working. Well, let's actually make this for our Spanish video, I guess. Pretty cool. I've said before in the podcast that I have always wanted to learn Spain. Spain's my favorite country in the world. I love to go there all the time. I don't speak Spanish. I always feel Bad about that. And now I don't have to because AI can do the job for me. Most full users actually use Flow more than their keyboards. Don't believe me? Go to Flow Wise AI to try it for yourself and download the app to use it everywhere. So pretty cool. Little freemium. So we can go in here and I can basically hold down the space bar and I can say, hey, Flow, we are going to cover the best AI apps here. We're starting productivity. We're actually covering Flow for the audience to begin with. And here we go. Transcribed what I said and so pretty cool. I will say that I started to use a little bit. I am definitely a typer. It might take me a little bit of time to get used to this because I do find that I have to write something out to be able to formulate it in my brain. And so my first version, if I just spit it out of my mouth, it's not actually as good. But I do think this is a really useful product, especially in Slack and things when you're just on your phone and you want to get back to people. It's way better if you could just like come back on voice and same with email. I would find it way better on mobile if I can come back via something like this than typing on mobile. So that's our first product to be more productive. Flow. Let's get into our second one. Okay. The next one that I think is super interesting is Cubby. And so let's dive into a quick bit of their product marketing video. It's quite long, so we're going to look a little bit and then I can talk talk about the use case and how this could actually help you to be much more productive. Good morning.

Morning Destroyers. Great news. I need a diligence talk on everything there is to know about space agriculture by Thursday. This Thursday?

Thursday's in two days.

How is that great news? Don't worry. Let's just start a Cubby.

Shout out to Descript who I think spawned a bunch of copycat type product marketing videos. This is actually a good video. I'm not dissing the video. I like it. But there's a lot of similarity, similarities in the way people are doing these kind of videos and what the script started. Cubby. What's Cubby?

Only the best tool ever. Just find PDFs, podcasts, MP3s, MP4s, YouTube videos, tweet threads, articles and files from your computer on whatever you're researching and drop it in. Cubby. Cubby transcribes and Combines them into a killer doc. Cubby, can I marry you?

All right, so what's it doing? It's actually allowing you to build a context window basically for an AI agent based upon anything you want to put into a single folder. So if you said, hey, I want to put. I want to research this topic and I want to put a. Put a bunch of podcasts in there and it can transcribe them for you. A bunch of documents, whatever it may be, that's really building a context window for an AI agent. And then you can actually have that AI agent talk to you about all the things that are in there. Let's run it a little bit more because it has some other kind of use cases. But like, if you're like me and you are constantly leaving lots of tabs open and you have all of these different podcasts you want to consume and every all of these other things you want to consume, what AI really helps you do is it's like an accelerated learning tool where you can put all of the things in one place and you become. Can extract the information you need on a singular topic. Because the AI is, you know, digesting all of that information and then giving you the core things that you need to know. Now it has some additional features. I'm like, maybe simplifying what it does, but that's like one of the core use cases. I remember Naval saying something about vertical farming, but I'd have to search for 50 hours of podcast to find it.

No worries. Just ask Cubby's AI assistant to find it for you.

There you go. So I like that, like you can actually add a bunch of podcasts and then find some of the things you want within those podcasts. I will say the one thing when I started looking at tools like this is I wonder how they survive the integration that Google has in. In things like Google Drive. And so for me, I think this is a really cool tool. But now I'm just starting to use Google Gemini because Google Gemini has access to all my Google Drive. So I just put everything in Google Drive and I can just query Gemini using. And I'm going to show you a little bit later, I could just query Gemini for anything I want that's in my Google Drive. And for the podcast use case, Gemini Flash, Google's latest model. If you want to retrieve any information about a podcast, like go and say, what can you tell me about the latest podcast episode? For marketing against the grain, it will pull the latest YouTube video and you can actually query it about that video right within the chat panel. So again, not actually. This is still a cool tool, but there are some of these big conglomerates that are integrated in AI everywhere. And it does make me wander around how these kind of point solutions will compete against the conglomerates like Google.

This TED talk is great, but the dorky professor spends most of her time complaining about her mother. No problem. Just select the five minutes she's coherent and copy will only use that.

That's pretty cool, right? You can actually add in content and take the parts that you actually want to have the AI aggregate with the rest of the content. There's a ton of cool things here in Cubby. I think it's a really good tool for anyone who wants to have different repositories on different topics. And the AI can actually aggregate all that together. It can actually give you all of the important information you need. This is one of the core things that AI does a great job of. It's like we all are unstructured data makers. We have unstructured data everywhere. I have incredible operating models around how to run large teams, but I'm also pretty disorganized in the background. And so AI for me helps me take all of my unstructured data and it pulls it all together for me and can actually give me the things that I need so I can be much more productive. So that's number two, Cubby. You can go sign up for the waiting list you need or you can get an invite and go try out that app. Let's get on to number three. So I'm just going to go back to the list to show you. These were get work done. We talked about Whisper. It's Whisper Flow. I call it Flow. We talked about Cubby. There's some other ones that are interested in here, but they've been like, Granola is a notetaker app. There's a ton of notetaker apps. Granola I've heard good things about, but basically being able to transcribe meetings into notes. I think you should be using some sort of tool to be able to do that. I do find that OpenAI's latest model, if I just transcribe on Zoom, if I just record the meeting, get the transcription and put it into Granola. It is not granola into OpenAI ChatGPT's latest model. It gives me the best meeting notes of any tool that I've used, but it's a little bit of a process. Whereas these things do it automatically. Gamma allows you to make like decks and docs and websites. So it's pretty good. Go, go try it out. Adobe, obviously, is a huge, huge company. It's a ton of AI features, Quora, there's a ton of email assistant tools. Again, I have started to just use Gemini integrated into my Google Drive and G suite a lot. And so that does a lot of this stuff for me.

Hey everyone, I want to talk about prompting with you today. Being great at prompting is like, gives you superpowers. It changes how you can build and work and do everything with AI. And because of that, we wanted to make a special guide just for you around how to get better at prompting framework for how you actually build prompts. And so we've got this baseline framework that you can then go and build and customize any prompts that you want to. You can check it out in the link of the description below. And right now we're going to get.

Back to today's show and we'll get into maybe, you know, we talked about Dharmesh's platform, Agent AI, and so there's a bunch of these. But like, Dharmesh's platform is the one that I use, agent AI. It's super cool. I want to get into build an audience. And so one of the things we talked a lot about in the podcast is like, okay, well, AI is taken from us because it's taken organic traffic. I think over time it will take and disrupt paid advertising traffic. What has it given us to grow our audience? And so, see, these are some of the best tools that A16 and Z think that it's providing us with to help our audience. And I want to cover a couple, but I will say what you'll notice is these are tools that can help you grow an audience if you are already a really experienced and great content creator. That's the point I would make about these tools, is if you have already some expertise in creating content, it can help you be more productive. But if you are someone who wants to start to grow an audience and you are still learning the skills and trying to figure out how to grow your audience, I don't actually think these tools are going to be that useful. But let's get into some examples. Let's start with Delphi. Okay, the first one is Delphi. AI basically allows you to clone yourself. So again, if you have expertise already, it allows you to create a clone, and that clone then can actually people can go to that clone and have a conversation with it. Right? So again, if you are not an expert in the space, it's not actually that helpful. It's not really helpful if you're trying to build your expertise and build your audience. And you can see here, okay, so if I go to discover, you'll see all of the people that they have signed up. So I can go and talk to any of these people. So again it's a way that you can actually give more value to your audience. I think there is a real good question of to be asked around. Do people really want to talk to the AI clone of yourself or do they want to talk to you? I think that over time AI is going to replace our want and needs for educational content where we don't really care about who's delivering that educational content. We just want the facts, we just want the information. But we will start to gravitate more and more towards individuals where we really care about a topic, where we really want their point of views, where we really want to hear from them. And I do wonder if we will want to talk to an AI clone or we want to talk to that person. But at the moment it is a kind of cool way of being able to talk to people and have and those clones are trained on their expertise. You're getting like a one to one conversation. And to show you an example we will dive into our great friend Brian Halligan and the co founder at HubSpot, partner over at Sequoia, an all around incredible human being. And Brian is one of the very few people on this planet along with Dharmesh that has grown a company of the size of HubSpot. And so what I want to talk to Brian about is hey, like I'm a SaaS company, I'm stuck at 10 million ARR and I want to try to grow to 30 million ARR. And so Brian gives me some pretty good feedback and I can dive in here more with him. And so I get like access to Brian's expertise. I can click on these links. What this is kind of cool is again they really bet this really is beneficial if you are already a content creator that has a ton of content because it creates these little links. And I can go in and dive more in around where Brian has talked about these subjects. So this is trained on all of the content we have that Brian has created and then it creates these little referral links that I can go learn more from Brian. So I do think it's a really great way to learn more from someone that you really value their expertise and you, you know you're not going to get a one on one conversation with Brian. Very few people are going be able to get a one on one conversation with Brian. But in this way I feel like I can get access to all of the things that Brian's created and have a somewhat conversation with him. So that's Delphi. A good way to grow your audience. If you are already an expert within a space, let's dive into the next tool. Okay, the next tool is Heygin. Everyone has really heard of hey Jin. We covered it a bunch of times in the podcast. I did a whole course actually I cloned myself and delivered the course through my AI clone and most people got really confused was it me or not? Because back then it was a Heygen. The version of hey Jen was not good with hand movements and so I kept my hands really still and I actually had people who know me email me back and said are you okay? You feel you seem a bit down in the video that I've just watched from you. I was teaching people how to do AI through my AI avatar canon meta and I was like, yeah, that's an AI clone of myself. And they were like oh that makes total sense. So I thought people thought I was like AI clones are kind of like emotionless kind of monotone. And so people thought I was having maybe some sort of breakdown. Hey Gen has got much better. So if you do create a clone of yourself, you can actually move your hands around. It's really, it's much, much better with motion. But I wanted to quickly cover some of the things they've got done in the labs and make a quick point again about like how I think about this for audience growth and do I think it's valuable or not? I think hey jn, cloning yourself is very similar to Delphi, right? If you actually have an audience, you have deep expertise, you can create a version of yourself and you can create content much, much video content much, much quicker short form video. For social particular, using your avatar will work pretty well. So that's a really good use case for hey Jen. If you are someone with an audience, you do have deep expertise, you've figured out how to create great content, then you can use hey Gen to accelerate that and be more productive and get more coverage via the avatar. If you are still learning the skills to do that, you really have to learn how to create content for these things to be valuable. It does have a lab section and it does have some new features that they are trialing. So I'm going to show you one of them and the reason I'm showing you this is because I want to make a Quick point around personality led content. This is not to dunk on Hagen. These are lab features. The thing I really believe is AI is going to really do two things for us as in terms of audience growth over the next like 12 months. Right. It already has in 2024. It's going to take away a lot more of our informational content, which is when someone wants some information, some educational content, AI is going to be a much better way to get that. Right. It's much quicker, it's easy to get. We've seen it through the AI assistance and it's going to help people who already have audiences and deep expertise to have some of these tools to create avatars of themselves and kind of increase the amount of output, increase the amount of coverage that they get. These other tools which are trying to help create like influential content. And I think if influential content is either podcast or video, where the personality really matters, AI is a long, long way from being able to disrupt that, what I call personality led content. I think personality led content is one of the best skills you can learn as a marketer to keep yourself defensible from AI. So let me show you a quick example of this. All right, so this basically has taken one of their new features and it allows you to create a kind of video podcast from a text based podcast or a text based blog post. So let's quickly show you this in action.

So have you noticed how AI is kind of, well, taking over content marketing lately? It's like everywhere.

Yeah.

Thing to watch out for here as we play the next 20 seconds is how much disdain the female co host has for anything the male co host says. Just look at her face and mannerisms.

I've seen that. But is it really making that big of a difference?

Is it really making that big of a difference? Pout.

Definitely. I mean like 46% of marketers are using AI for producing content like emails and newsletters.

Really?

That's almost half.

Whoa, that's huge. So how exactly is AI helping with emails?

Well, how exactly is it helping with emails, you idiot?

Starters, timing optimization. I can figure out the best time to send emails when people are most likely. I love the look she's given them to open them. It's like having a crystal ball.

Haha.

All right. You know, I do wonder what happened between these two. Is obviously something's gone awry. Maybe whatever it may be, she's not enjoying. She's not enjoying what he's saying.

Crystal ball for marketing. But does that really make a difference?

Oh, absolutely.

All right. So we're a long way again, this is a beta feature. This is not one of the core features that people use. Hey gen 4 hey gen. Most people are using it for the avatar or the ability to localize content which is incredible for this is a beta feature. But the reason I show this is to show you how far AI is away from actually being able to deliver on personality LED content. Like content that really is where the personality and the basically influential content the way I think about it is like the actual personality the person is as is as important as the content being delivered. And so these kind of audience growth tools are not helping with that. I think most of them help when you already have deep expertise and you can create something to expand your reach. Let's just go through a couple of the others really quick. And so more clones. This one is specifically for short form content. It's a startup called R Geel. I don't know that's named right. I will say unfortunately you know, for them I was going to create a video and show you what it looked like featuring me but their app does not seem to work right now. Let's actually look at one of their videos. You can see that they're to show you how they're tailored really for short form content which I do like.

Hi, I'm Blue and this is my AI clone speaking. I've just uploaded a two minute video of myself and now I can create studio.

So a kind of nice use of notion like a hey Jin can do this now but like you know, cool use in motion. I do think like the you would, you would instantly know because of the.

Voice quality videos simply by typing text. It's magical. You can teach, promote and entertain by generating videos in seconds with Argill.

So basically you know, clone short from video again really need to already have audience teach spectrum tease. And I think these tools are kind of interesting. And the last one I'll just quickly, really, really quickly show you because people already know this tool. The next one we'll show is Opus. So people have used this basically Opus takes long form content and then divides short videos. Here's a example from Lex Freeman which was an interesting experience because I got. I got food poisoning on the plane. And so like literally when the plane landed I went straight into an ambulance, into a hospital overnight. The manager picked me up and I showed up. You get the point. So the thing I would say and I do think a lot about for these AI tools is what happens is they're going to create the average version of the thing. And because everyone will be able to create the average version, you then need to put a lot of time and effort to create the version that gets more attention. So these are kind of all table stakes. Like I have a piece of long term video, I'll use an AI tool, cut it up in short form and maybe I'll get some views in those. But they're not going to set the world alight. Like if you actually go back and watch the episode with Jenny Hoyas, she has spent three years to master how to create short form videos. And so an AI tool is not gonna be able to give you that. Right? And so you're gonna get average results because you're gonna have an average templatized video. That is the truth. And so they're the, there's some like interesting ones and grow your audience, but there's nothing that I think is going to set your world alight. The next one I want to get into is how to build things and just give you one quick tool that you might want to play around with. Because now we're all coders, right? I was a coder, not a very good one. My background, everyone knows computer science, developer, bad developer, then became a marketer. But there's a ton of great agents and I've used for the most part Claude. I've been demoing Claude. I use Claude all the time. Use Claude for everything. But I wanted to actually show Replit. Replit is like mind blowing. Their AI agent is incredible. They're an incredible tool. And this really is an example of why we're all going to have personalized software. And actually personalized software is going to start to disrupt the core category of software in and of itself. And let me give you a quick example. So I'm sitting there watching a little bit of TV and talking to my partner and we're like, hey, we need to start to get better schedule. And we have a 10 month old and really every hour matters. And we kind of use Google Calendar, but it's not exactly what we want. And so I'm like, well, why don't I just build something for us? And so I built a scheduler and basically it allows us to, you know, it's not fully finished but we have like two side by side days that go from 6am to 8pm that's what happens parents. And you can basically now add anything that I have in that time slot. And then because we do a lot of things together when we, when we want to play with our little daughter, we can merge this we can mark it as completed, but now we can see side by side what we're doing each and every hour. And so we can better plan our day. We can give each other breaks, things like that. And so this is an example of like, well, I don't need all of these. I don't need a tool with all of the features. I just need some that are bespoke to me. And so now with ReBit, AI agent and some of these other tools, you can actually build real products for yourself, but you can build real tools for your, you know, customers that I think free tools become much more of the marketing playbook. So Replit is an incredible tool. I really recommend getting to using it, building something it is. So it's so much fun as well. The next one is Notebook LLM. It is an incredible tool. We are going to do a full episode. Keep already did that episode. We're going to come back to do a full episode on this because they've added a ton of functionality and a ton of features and I can't get cover it all in one video. It is so good. I use Notebook LLM all the time. I basically have. I basically hook it up to all of my different folders that I need to use within work and it's like really cool. I can go in here, I can create briefing docs. I can basically ask it to create a little podcast featuring all of the work that I have going on within that topic. I can basically create an audio review. I can create this. This study guide. Study guide is really cool. It basically allows you to create a study style guide on any top and any kind of content you put into the folder. So anyway, I'm skipping through it here really fast because there's a full episode we'll do on this. It's a really great tool. If it's not one that you've started to use yet, I would start to use it. Stay tuned to the podcast and we'll do a full episode on it. The last one I wanted to cover, which I thought was kind of cool and I can do it really fast, is this one called Napkin AI. So Napkin AI is another image generator, but very different. It generates business images, not kind of consumer images. And so it actually, for example, will take my latest LinkedIn post and then it will create a variety of different like images that I can add into that post. And I found it really good for creating things that would actually be much more suitable for business content. Like a lot of the ones that you're looking at Image generators are great for consumer, but this is really great for like business. And so this one shows you. I Talked about the AI driven procurement process where AI would take over all of our B2B buying needs and it creates all these different varieties of images I can use in that app. And so that is some of the tools that I covered, some of the ones you can start to use in 2024. Of course if you stay tuned to the podcast, you'll get way, way more apps as we're launching anything that we think is cool. More kind of B2B apps as well. And you'll get a full episode of Notebook LLM. I couldn't carve root in this because this video has gone very, very long and there's tons of incredible features. That is your 2024 unwrapped list from a16Z with some of the ones that I went on call out. Stay tuned for the podcast if you want to know everything you need to know about AI in 2025 and I'll see you on the next episode.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa.

I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better.