Knowing which AI tool to use can be hard to figure out – there are apparently 10,500 tools out there. I suggest a place to start…
About a year ago, I stopped using Google as my primary search engine.
I’ve been more or less Google-independent for a year now, but there are instances where I return to the great search mothership. My path through this process may provide some useful pointers to finding your way through the maze of LLM tools that now blink their alluring lights at us all.
(You can read more about the ditching of Google here.)
Thinking back on it, there are two things about my search engine move that are worth looking at:
First, I had been using Google for years. I knew how it worked, I had a host of tricks for getting what I wanted out of it. It was as familiar to me as making a cup of tea.
Second, I knew what it had stopped giving me, where it was failing (so I knew what I was looking for in an alternative).
Using that information, I was able to make a choice about a new search engine.
And then, when I found the new search engine, I was able to make judicious choices about where I needed to return to using Google.
To sum up how I now do searches: I use Brave’s AI summary to provide me with a list of sources, and I look at the conventional list of links (much less littered with spam and slop than a Google search). But Brave is poor at hyper-local results, so I use Google on my phone to find the opening hours of the local pharmacy. And Google is still the killer app for finding me free pictures.
How to apply this to the big mish-mash of AI tools
In the AI learning circle I run (and in the one I attend), people often ask: But what tool is right for doing (insert a task here)? And that’s a good question!
Because the range of choice can seem overwhelming. This is not just being faced with 10 different kinds of coffee when all you wanted was coffee with cold milk. It’s much, much bigger than that.
A site called aitools.xyz has a library of 10,500+ AI tools – a number which is presumably growing all the time.
I’m here to tell you that this is not as daunting as it sounds.
Many of those tools will have very specific uses – the site’s list of categories is broad, from audio right through to web development. In Professionals’ Tools, for instance, there’s a subcategory of tools for architects which includes something which can automate floor plan measurements. Unless you’re an architect, you don’t need this one at all, I would think. So that large number of tools will at the outset be made much smaller because you only need to look at the tools that are relevant to you.
That’s still not a simple thing, though.
How to know what you don’t know
It’s tempting to say that finding AI tools that will help you do work or life or both better (or quicker) starts with figuring out what you need done. But for a lot of people that falls into the category of “unknown unknowns” (to use this list from US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in 2002: “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”)
So if you’re an architect and know that floor plan measurements take up an inordinate amount of really boring time, you can go straight to that tool and test it out. But if you spend a lot of time (say) figuring out if a given plant is a weed or not, there may be no way of knowing whether AI can help you or not.
So what to do?
I’d suggest an approach that is both broad and unthreatening: get to know one generalised tool or platform, and ask it all sorts of things, all the time (which is the way we all learned to use Google over the years):
- Give me a recipe for zucchini, butternut and chicken breasts
- Help me figure out how this new gizmo works?
- Give me a picture for my daughter’s fourth birthday party – she loves unicorns and beetles and the colour red!
- Assess this email I am about to write to my boss / business partner and tell me if it gets across the point that I am really cross but don’t want to burn my bridges.
Then, when you are happy that you know the ins and outs of that platform, use another one for a couple of weeks.
And then branch out a bit. When a friend says: I used XXX to do YYY, have a look at the tool they are talking about. When one of those “I tested four tools and this one won” headlines appears on your phone (because it will), click on it and skim it. If something in there seems interesting, have a look to see what it does
What general platform to use?
Based on a demo we did in the learning circle over the last couple of weeks, these four general platforms are a good place to start, listed here alphabetically:
General trend to observe: You’ll see as you play that all these tools will get things wrong or will not give you what you want (it may turn out that an AI attempt to make a beetle / unicorn is just plain icky). They may say: I can’t search the Internet so I can’t look for a list of weeds.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be broadly useful! But if you start with non-important playing, you’ll be able to see what works for you and what doesn’t. You’ll also be learning the process of prompting as you go.
Remember: asking AI about important legal or medical issues is not a good place to start! And if you are wondering about the socially responsible way to pick an AI assistant, have a look at my post: Figuring out which AI tools to use – it’s not a pretty picture
Now start getting serious
Having done all this, you’ll be starting to have the sense that AI might be able to help you with that plant / weed problem, after all.
Or you might wake up at 3am and have a brainwave about how it can help you take that pile of hand-written letters from your late great-aunt and turn them into a family resource.
Your 7am list will now read: is there a tool to transcribe handwriting? Is there a tool to summarise the text of the letters and find themes? Is there a tool which will edit my spelling when I’m done?
This list will be possible because it springs out of a new-found familiarity with what an AI tool might be able to do.
But what if I know more or less what I want to do?
I’d recommend looking at this article for some ideas:
The top 20 AI tools of 2025 – and the #1 thing to remember when you use them | ZDNET
There’s a handy list (in a graphic) of the most popular tools of 2025. As far as I can tell it is copyrighted and so not reproducible here. But there are colour-coded categories which are useful:
- AI chatbot – top contender is ChatGPT
- AI graphics tool – Canva is no 1
- Translation – DeepL is tops (though no African languages)
- Writing assistant – look at Grammarly
Final word
The post has a detailed (and techie) breakdown of the methods used to compile the list. And there’s this gem of an insight: that analysis process was done by hand, not with AI tools. David Gewirtz, the author, writes:
Oh yes, I spent hours going down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT trying to get it to take in the datasets and spit out an aggregate, but it got stubborn.
Really, really stubborn. It complained it couldn’t read the data. So I converted the data into text, but it still got confused. It began conflating results from the different sources. It lost track of its progress and we had to start over, three or four times.
…I soon realized that the negotiating and cajoling process with the AI would take longer than filling the Nespresso water tank to brew some espresso and doing it all by hand, using the technology of caffeine to aid me.
Yes, I do see the irony of an article on AI tool popularity being done entirely without the help of AI tools.
Gerwitz concludes that these tools are just tools. “If you’re going to use them, you’ll have to be able, constantly, to determine when the tool is the fastest path and when the old-school way will get you there either faster or more reliably, or both.”
And that’s the reason, above all else, I suggest starting by playing. It’s the way you learned as a child, and it’s the way you should learn now – non-seriously, gathering anything and everything in your path. It will become clear, in time, I promise. Because that’s the way I did it.
Main picture: Kevin Jarrett, Unsplash
OTHER THINGS I HAVE WRITTEN
How to write a good prompt for AI – A common complaint about AI is that it just doesn’t give good answers. That’s because you are asking questions. Instead, here’s my guide to how to write a good prompt.
Figuring out which AI tools to use – it’s not a pretty picture – Doing the right thing is complicated. Figuring out which AI tools to use is not just about being cool; it’s a consumer decision too.
How to get away from Google search – Searching for a better search engine? Here’s my rough-and-ready guide on how to get away from Google (which may now be evil).
How to find a free picture – If you run a blog, or do social media posting for yourself or for your company, you are often going to need a picture (or pictures) to illustrate your work. Here’s how
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