Most businesses are using one AI tool for everything, then wondering why it is mediocre at all of it.
The fix is not more subscriptions. It is five tools, one job each, with no overlap. Here is the stack we would hand to any small business tomorrow, what each one is genuinely for, and what it actually costs once you get past the free tier.
01. Claude
The job: writing
Free tier · paid plans from around £15 a month
Not ChatGPT. For anything you have to put your name on, Claude holds a brief across a long document better and needs less rewriting afterwards. That difference compounds when the output is going to a client.
What to actually use it for
- Proposals. Paste in your last three winning proposals and the new brief. Ask it to draft in the same structure and voice. You are editing, not starting from a blank page.
- Awkward emails. Chasing an invoice, pushing back on scope creep, letting a client down gently. Give it the situation and the outcome you want, and ask for two versions at different levels of firmness.
- SOPs. The documentation nobody ever writes. Talk through how you do a task, paste the transcript in, and ask for a step-by-step process document. A job that used to eat a morning now takes ten minutes.
- Turning one thing into five. A case study becomes a LinkedIn post, an email, a landing page section and a sales one-pager.
Our bias, declared. Claude is the tool we personally reach for most, so treat this as a genuine preference rather than a neutral verdict. Run your own real work through it and one alternative before you commit.
02. Tidio
The job: customer service
Free plan · paid from around £22 a month · AI add-on from £29
It answers your FAQs at three in the morning so you do not have to. Tidio combines live chat, a chatbot flow builder and an AI agent called Lyro, which trains on your existing help pages and answers in your own tone.
What to actually use it for
- The same five questions. Delivery times, opening hours, returns, pricing, do you cover my area. Answer them once, properly, and never again.
- Out of hours capture. Someone lands at 11pm ready to buy. Instead of a contact form, they get an answer and you get the lead in the morning.
- Order status for ecommerce. The Shopify integration lets it handle "where is my order" without a human touching it.
- Knowing when to escalate. The useful part is the handover. Anything it cannot answer goes to a real person rather than looping the customer.
One honest caveat on "free". The free plan is real, but it is a starter tier: roughly 50 conversations a month, and the Lyro AI allowance is a one-time 50 conversations rather than monthly. The AI that does the actual heavy lifting is a paid add-on. Excellent for testing whether this solves a problem for you. Budget for the paid tier if it does.
03. Perplexity
The job: research
Free tier · Pro around £15 a month
Not Google, and not a general chatbot either. Perplexity is built specifically for looking things up: it searches live, answers the question, and cites its sources so you can check the claim before you repeat it.
What to actually use it for
- Pre-pitch homework. Fifteen minutes on a prospect's market, competitors and recent news before you walk into the room.
- Checking a stat before you publish it. The citation is the entire point. If it cannot show you a source, do not use the number.
- Supplier and tool comparisons. Genuinely faster than opening nine tabs of review sites.
- Regulation and compliance questions. A sensible starting point, with sources you can hand to someone qualified to confirm.
04. Google Veo 3.1
The job: video
Free via Google Vids · Google AI Pro £18.99 a month · API from pennies a clip
The best all-rounder in AI video right now. What separates Veo 3.1 from the rest is that it generates the audio with the picture: synchronised dialogue, sound effects and ambience in one pass, rather than a silent clip you have to score afterwards.
It works from a text prompt or a still image, does landscape and vertical, and can chain shots together for something longer than a single clip.
What to actually use it for
- Social ads at volume. Six versions of the same concept for testing, made in an afternoon, for less than the coffee budget of a shoot.
- Product and explainer clips. Feed it a product photo and animate it, rather than booking a studio for a fifteen-second demo.
- B-roll and filler. The establishing shots and cutaways that are tedious to source and rarely worth a licence fee.
- Pitching an idea. Showing a client a rough thirty-second version of the ad beats describing it in a deck. This alone has won us work.
Pick the right tier and use it in the right order. The family splits into Lite, Fast and Quality, roughly an eight-fold price range. Draft on the cheap tier until the idea is right, then generate the final on Quality. People who burn money on Veo are usually iterating at the top tier. Note that the cheapest tier drops the audio, which is the main reason to use Veo at all.
Two practical limits. Clips are short by default, so anything long needs stitching. And a usable take often takes several attempts, so budget for retries rather than assuming one prompt equals one finished asset. Check the current terms on disclosure and commercial use before anything customer-facing goes out.
05. Lovable
The job: websites and landing pages
Free tier · Pro around £19 a month
Describe the site you want in plain English and Lovable builds it, hosts it and puts it live. It produces real working code rather than a template you fight with, which is why it clears the bar Squarespace and Canva never quite reach.
What to actually use it for
- Campaign landing pages. A dedicated page per offer, live the same day, instead of bending your homepage out of shape.
- Testing an idea before you build it. Put up a page, run a small amount of traffic at it, see whether anyone bites.
- Internal tools. The booking form or simple tracker you have been managing in a spreadsheet for two years.
- Client prototypes. Something clickable to show in the room beats a static mockup every time.
Two corrections worth making. Lovable builds sites and apps; it is not an image generator, so pair it with a dedicated tool if you need original imagery. And a demo is not a production system. Anything handling payments or customer data still needs a human to review security before it goes live.
Five tools, five jobs. The businesses getting value out of AI are not the ones using the most of it. They are the ones who decided what each thing is for.
How to actually start
Do not adopt all five this week. Pick the one job that is costing you the most time right now, use that tool only, and give it a fortnight. When it is genuinely part of how you work, add the next one.
Every tool here has a free tier. You can test the whole stack for nothing and only pay for the ones that earn it.
Want help working out which of these fits your business? Get in touch.
Pricing and feature details checked July 2026 against provider sites and independent reviews including Capterra, Chatimize, Website Builder Expert and Google's own developer blog. AI pricing changes frequently, so confirm current plans before committing. Prices are shown in pounds. Google AI Pro is a UK list price; Tidio, Perplexity and Lovable bill in US dollars, so those sterling figures are approximate, converted at 1.34 in July 2026, and your card may add a conversion fee. Product screenshots and brand imagery belong to their respective providers.
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