“What’s the one AI tool I need?”
I get this question from MSPs every week. It’s the wrong question.
Asking which one AI tool you need is like a contractor walking into a hardware store and asking which one tool he needs to build a house. A hammer? A saw? A drill? Pick one and figure it out? You’d never do that. You need a toolbox full of tools because each is good at a specific task.
AI tools are very much the same way, so instead of one, or two, you may need 10 or 15.
And yeah, when that credit card statement comes in at the end of the month, it might look longer than a Blockbuster receipt. (IYKYK.) But most tools run about $20 a month. Even if you went wild and bought 10 of them, you’d be at $200 for the month.
A year ago, could you have hired one person for $200 a month who would write you weekly, search-engine-optimized blogs for five industries in 25 seconds, build a working website mockup in two minutes, make a custom Nashville-dentist welcome video in 15 minutes, and crank out a 38-page report by lunch? You couldn’t. Nobody could.
Here’s the bigger question though, and this is the one most people are missing.
Stop thinking about your business in terms of jobs and roles. Start thinking about it in terms of tasks and workflows. Every job in your company is just a set of tasks designed to produce specific outcomes.
Walk through every task. Ask whether AI can do it. If yes, AI does it; if no, then a person does it. That’s the order of operations now. It’s not “what does my marketing manager do all day.” It’s “what tasks need to get done, and what’s the cheapest, fastest, BEST way to get each one done.”
I’m not saying AI should replace your people; it should be their best co-worker, which allows them to work on higher dollar-per-hour activities that AI can’t do.
An even bigger question…
But the real win isn’t in replacing what you’re already doing. It’s asking yourself and your team, “What’s something we know we should be doing but aren’t right now?”
The LinkedIn videos. The niche-specific blogs. The custom prospect outreach. The SOPs you’ve been promising to write for two years. The thing that’s been on the list forever because it was too hard, too expensive, too time-consuming, or too incredibly daunting to even start. Pick that. Then find the tool on this list that does it.
This is a NON-exhaustive list of 21 tools I recommend, with the specific job I recommend each one for. I do not use all of these tools every day. A few are tools I’ve never used, but I know others who use and like them. They are not all created equal, but each one earns its keep the moment you actually need it. Use this list to get started.
Writing, research & thinking
Best writing tool: Claude.ai, $20/mo. My go-to for anything longer than 500 words. Has written 120-page books and 38-page reports for me, and rewritten generic blogs into industry-specific versions in about 25 seconds.
Best thought partner: ChatGPT, $20/mo. Where I run ideas, strategies, and questions before moving forward with a project. It’s great for giving lots of ideas, providing feedback, and talking with virtual experts by telling it to pretend it’s [insert expert name here].
Best research tool: Perplexity, $20/mo. Where I go when I need real sources, stats, and quotes I can cite, with the link attached so I can tell whether it came from the New York Times or Reddit.
Best infographic creator: NotebookLM, $19.99/mo. Drop in a blog or a topic and it spits out polished infographics, timelines, and deconstructions that look hand-designed. Posts straight to LinkedIn.
Best for news, events & local chat: Gemini, $19.99/mo. Runs on Google’s engine, so it’s the one I trust for current events, local happenings, and just plain everyday life questions. It diagnosed my fiancée’s leaky faucet from a photo last weekend, saved me a $300 plumber bill, and made me look super manly (or at least manlier) in front of my fiancée. That’s worth its weight in gold.
Design, images & presentations
Best image tool: Ideogram, $8/mo. Quick, easy image generation. Eight-bit, photorealistic, claymation, whatever style you want, four to eight images back in seconds.
Best all-in-one design tool: Canva, $15/mo. The consolidator your marketing person already knows. If you can only justify one design tool to start, this is the one.
Best presentation tool: Gamma, $10/mo. Type a prompt, get a real-looking deck in three and a half minutes. I’ve done hundreds of presentations, with Gamma what usually takes 2-3 hours can be done in minutes and looks WAY better.
Best pixel-to-vector tool: Vectorizer.ai, $9.99/mo. Turns low-res logos into clean vector files you can actually put on a website without them looking like garbage. Does other things too, but they’re probably only cool if you’re a graphic designer or on a creative team.
Video, audio & avatars
Best long video generator: Invideo, $25/mo. Plugged a brand script for Nashville dentists into it and got a 90 second welcome video back in 15 minutes. Made a Pixar-style explainer for Houston small businesses for fun and it’s still better than 95% of the boring posts on my LinkedIn feed. (Your posts excluded obviously… they are AMAZING!)
Best social media video tool: CapCut, $19.99/mo. Throw long videos in, gets short snackable clips out. Captions, highlights, split screens, multiple formats, done.
Best video editing tool: Descript, $24/mo. Edit video by editing the transcript. Want to swap “attorneys” for “CPAs” across an entire webinar? Done. Cut a stumble or a teaching point you didn’t like. It’s like editing a Word doc and getting a new video out.
Best video avatar tool: HeyGen, $29/mo. Lifelike AI video avatars of yourself. Pair it with ElevenLabs and you’ve got you, in your voice, speaking English, Spanish, or Italian. Fantastico!
Best short video generator: Gemini (Veo 3.1), $19.99/mo. Eight-second AI clips that stop the scroll on LinkedIn. Three a day, 90 a month, included in the same $19.99 as Gemini.
Best voiceover tool: ElevenLabs, $5/mo. Voice cloning and hundreds of stock voices for five bucks a month, which is borderline criminal. Their agents handle voice chatbots too, if that’s where you’re heading.
Best music tool: Suno, $8/mo. AI music. Threw it on the list because two MSPs told me they actually incorporate music into their marketing. Asked it for a reggae song about a struggling MSP whose life turns around at a conference. It delivered and we be jammin’.
Automation, development & MSP-specific
Best development tool: Replit, $25/mo. Vibe coding for people who don’t code. Built a working CPA-firm website mockup in just over two minutes from a BrandScript. Best used to give your web guy a real starting point instead of “thinking out loud” and hoping they deliver exactly what you had in mind.
Best ‘developer’ automation tool: n8n, $24/mo. Best for the people who actually are a bit techy. One MSP is running an n8n automations that killed 70% of his level-1 tickets.
Best ‘mere human’ automation tool: Make.com, $24/mo. Drag-and-drop version of n8n for the rest of us. Less custom, way more usable for us less tech-evolved humans.
Best AI calling tool: CloseBot, $64/mo. AI voice bot for inbound and outbound calls. Don’t start here. Get a chatbot working first, learn the rules, then graduate to voice. Never personally used it, but people I trust in the industry rely on it.
Best training tool / SOP builder: Scribe, $25/mo. Click through any process while Scribe watches and it spits out a step-by-step SOP with screenshots. Lifesaver when somebody goes on vacation and nobody else knows how to post the blog or send out invoices.
Best MSP-specific AI manager: Hatz, $50 to $199/mo. Make and n8n, but pre-built specifically for MSPs. Hundreds of agents and workflows already done, built by MSPs for MSPs.
That’s 21, loosely categorized, and again, not the only good tools out there.
Pick one task this week. Something you know you should be doing and haven’t. Find the tool on this list that does it. Get it done. Then pick another one next week. AI is great at boring repetitive tasks that most humans don’t like doing. So let it work!
To learn more about how to automate using AI, check out our latest Eye on AI article, Automate the routine, elevate the human: how MSPs can optimize with AI.
