What AI tools are brand experts actually using?
With thousands of tools on the market, it’s hard to separate what adds value from what just sounds good in a demo. So, we asked 15 experts to share the tools they rely on — the ones that have earned a permanent spot in their stack. The result is a curated, community-backed list organized by use case, updated every quarter.
Anyword
An AI and copywriting platform for marketers to generate and optimize high-converting text for ads, social media, emails, and website copy.
“Anyword has proven to be a great AI tool for my content team. It not only provides excellent repurposing of long form copy but also acts as a super reliable translator for our copy localisation too.”
Graham Sturt
Head of Creative, Monotype
beautiful.ai
An AI-powered presentation tool that automatically handles slide formatting and layout, letting users focus on content rather than design.
“Creating slides can be a huge time suck, whether for an event or internal presentations. Beautiful.ai makes the whole process much faster, and the results look really professional and polished.”
Emily Kramer
Founder, MKT1 Newsletter
Canva
Canva's creative assistant generates designs, images, videos and copy from text or voice prompts - with every output remaining fully editable.
“Canva is an intuitive design platform that helps me to quickly create polished content fast. Their features like "Magic Write" helps to generate content, templates and guides design choices whilst their AI-powered colour matching helps everything look on point. They have lots of creative designs to choose from too.”
Kavita Patel
Head of Advisory, WARC EMEA & Senior Strategist, LIONS Advisory, LIONS Advisory
Claude
Anthropic's family of AI assistants is designed for safe, accurate help with writing, analysis, coding, and complex reasoning.
“Making mini-apps and developing skills is my favorite thing about it. Where I started to solve repetitive tasks first, I see how I'm becoming more advances tackling tougher problems with AI.”
Lodewijk de Vries
Head of Demand Generation, Semrush
Clay
A go-to-market platform that combines data enrichment, AI agents, and intent signals to help sales and marketing teams find and act of leads.
“We love it–it’s one of those tools you start using and it instantly feels magical. We actually used Clay to research which companies to include in our AI Showcase (how meta).”
Emily Kramer
Founder, MKT1 Newsletter
Cursor
An AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE) that lets developers write, edit, and debug code through natural language and AI chat.
“The capability to code and iterate on your locally stored files, with a very good and accurate output... is insane.”
Albert Gjergjaj
Designer, Frontify
Flora
An AI-powered "intelligence canvas" for collaborative, node-based creative workflows combining text, image generation, and video creation.
“Flora has an intuitive nodal interface, flexibility across models and formats, and granular control. It gets out of your way while giving you every lever you need.”
Dylan Mulvaney
Head of Design, Gretel
Langdock
An AI platform that helps companies adopt generative AI, with features like AI chat, customizable agents, and workflow automation.
“Langdock is my favorite AI platform. As a secure, model-agnostic operating system, it ensures we aren't locked into one vendor. At Mutabor, we use it to build custom, EU-hosted agents & skills for all our teams. It turns our workflows from a simple shortcut with AI into a real sparring partner that challenges our ideas and protects our work from mediocrity.”
Niklas Karbowiak
Manager Business Strategy & Innovation, Mutabor
Notion
An AI assistant built into Notion that helps users write, research, summarize meetings, and automate tasks across docs, projects, and connected apps.
“Because it supports you on automating processes and workflows, helps on summarising and collecting insightful data on projects into a powerful centralised knowledge hub.”
Antonio Pedro Fernandes Araujo
Lead Design Manager, Manyone
Openclaw
An open-source personal AI assistant that runs on users' own machines and can manage email, calandars, files, and other tasks through any chat app.
“The ability for both these tools (OpenClaw and ChatGPT) to think through challenges, self-install skills and create output beyond the chat make them worthy sparring partners. With OpenClaw, being able to calibrate it's "Soul' and connect via API to almost anything makes it a very powerful buddy.”
Eric Ng
Partner, Further
Pencil
Pencil connects design and code in one workflow. Teams can generate, refine, and ship production-ready UI within your development environment while keeping every component on brand.
“I think that in the future, the integrated AI tools in programmes such as Figma and Pencil will play an increasingly important role in UI design.”
Nora Raab
Designer, Peter Schmidt Group
Perplexity
An AI-powered search engine that provides direct, accurate answers to complex queries in real time, with cited sources instead of a list of links.
“I like the curation of LLMs Perplexity brings together and the variety of products they offer from AI-powered search to Perplexity Computer which is mind-blowing!”
Jonny Spindler
CEO, JKR
tofu
An AI demand generation platform that researches target accounts, generates personalized content, and activates it across email, ads, and landing pages.
“Personalization used to be something we talked about in marketing, but couldn’t really do at scale. It felt a bit like a pipe dream, but that’s no longer true. With Tofu, creating personalized content across many channels is much easier.”
Emily Kramer
Founder, MKT1 Newsletter
Figma Weave
A node-based AI platform that combines multiple AI models with professional editing tools for creating and editing images, videos, and animations.
“Weave by Figma focuses on the design process itself, weaving together multiple generative tools into a single, more intentional workflow. It gives designers greater control to explore ideas, apply branding principles, and develop identity systems with more rigour, helping translate creative thinking into coherent, scalable design outcomes.”
Tom Gilbert
Group ECD, Design Bridge and Partners
WPP
WPP's agentic marketing platform that connects strategy, creative, media, and data into one workspace for end-to-end campaign planning and execution.
“WPP Open is our proprietary, pioneering agentic marketing platform that helps AKQA deliver sharper, better-informed strategies and creative ideas, faster than ever before in a secure system that protects client data.”
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