There’s an AI tool for everything, but only a few are must-haves for everyone.
And I’m not talking about those AI tools that are great for a specific field (coding, writing, etc), but those tools that you might regret not using now because they can help you learn faster and become more productive no matter what your job is.
Here’s the top 4 AI tools I believe everyone should use.
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1. Google AI Studio: Your real-time AI tutor
Google AI Studio is an all-in-one platform to experiment with Google’s latest Gemini AI models. It offers text, image, audio, and even video generation in one place.
What makes Google AI Studio stand out is its real-time screen sharing feature. This feature allows us to share our screens, enabling us to analyze on-screen content and provide real-time assistance.
Anyone with a Google account can use this feature for free. Here’s how to start working with it:
Once you grant permission to share your screen and microphone, you can start talking to it in real time.
In a previous article, I showed how this feature can speed up your Python learning—but Google AI Studio is just as useful for exploring, troubleshooting, or streamlining any program or task on your computer.
For example, the other day, it guided me on how to use Photoshop to edit an image generated with ChatGPT.
If you’re a Photoshop expert, you probably have better ways to edit this image. That said, Google AI Studio still offers useful solutions for beginners.
To sum it up, anyone who needs real-time assistance on their computer should use Google AI Studio.
2. NotebookLM: Your honest assistant for digesting information
If your work involves reading and synthesizing lots of information, Google’s NotebookLM can be a game-changer. NotebookLM is like an AI research tool that is grounded in your own documents. You can upload PDFs, Google Docs, or even YouTube transcripts into NotebookLM, and it’ll generate summaries, answer questions with citations, FAQs, and even podcasts.
In the demo below, I use NotebookLM to generate a summary of a YouTube video.
Instead of manually skimming large reports, notes, or papers, you can ask NotebookLM to highlight key points or explain a section, and it will respond with references to the exact source document.
I used NotebookLM to generate a summary of this paper. After a few minutes, it generated a summary, along with follow-up questions you could ask.
On the right panel, you’ll find additional options such as generating a study guide, an FAQ, and (my favorite) a podcast. I love podcasts because you can listen to summaries on the go.
Here’s the podcast it generated for the paper.
Something great about NotebookLM is that it sticks to the provided sources, so you’re less likely to get wild AI hallucinations. That said, it won’t answer questions beyond those materials. Unlike a general chatbot, it won’t pull new info from the web unless you import it.
3. Perplexity: Best lightweight AI search
If Google and ChatGPT had a child, it’d be Perplexity.
When you need answers with evidence or want to research a topic fast, Perplexity AI is the tool to use. You simply ask it any question, and it returns a concise, direct answer along with cited sources from the web
Now, I know what you’re thinking—why use Perplexity when there’s ChatGPT’s Search mode?
Well, unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity is optimized for search. It often breaks down your question into multiple sub-queries and performs several searches in parallel. Also, it allows you to choose between different AI model (Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Grok 4, o3, etc) and lets you steer the search with topic-specific modes (academic, social, and finance.)
Recently, Perplexity even shipped an AI web browser called Comet, which aims to challenge Google’s dominance in search.
The way I use ChatGPT and Perplexity is this: I often use ChatGPT for coding, analysis, deep research (more on this later), and other heavy tasks, while I leave simple search queries, preliminary research, and analysis to Perplexity.
Basically, I replaced Google search with Perplexity.
And there’s more. In the Pro Plan ($20/month), Perplexity offers a cool feature that takes searching to a new level: Deep Research. This feature is best for more complex research. When this feature is enabled, Perplexity will spend a few minutes performing dozens of searches and reading hundreds of pages, then give you a comprehensive report on the topic.
This Deep Research feature is good and cheap for many tasks, but I believe Perplexity is best for basic and not-so-complex research. Why? Because for more complex reports that you might need for work or university, there’s a more expensive (but powerful) Deep Research tool within ChatGPT and Gemini.
This leads us to our next AI tool.
4. Deep Research: Powerful AI research
Deep Research is a feature that is available in both ChatGPT and Gemini. This feature is like having a personal research analyst on demand. It tackles complex questions by autonomously browsing the web, reading dozens of articles, and synthesizing a multi-page report with sources.
You can use Deep Research whenever you have to search multiple sites to gather information. This AI research assistant can be used for business strategy, academic work, or even personal projects like planning a detailed vacation itinerary.
I’ve been using ChatGPT’s Deep Research to collect information for my articles, build reports, and more. To work with it, turn on “Run deep research“ from the tools menu and then write your prompt.
As you can see, ChatGPT asks some extra questions to improve the quality of the response. Once you answer all its questions, it spends anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes collecting information from different sources and building the report.
I haven’t used Gemini’s Deep Research as much, but some comparisons have shown that Gemini’s Deep Research has lower quality research than ChatGPT’s, but others have shown similar performance.
Deep Research is available for free on ChatGPT (5 tasks/month using the lightweight version) and Gemini. However, if you want to get their full version, you’ll have to pay $200 for ChatGPT Pro (125 tasks/month + 125/month using the lightweight version) or $249.99 for Google AI Ultra.
This is my list of must-have AI tools. If you think there’s a tool that should be added to this list, let me know in the comments!