S2. Ep3 - Top 5 AI and Automation Tools For Small Businesses In 2026

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Null, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie. And as always, I've got Noel here with me. Hey Noel.

Noel: Hello.

Katie: How you doing?

Noel: Absolutely fabulous this week.

Katie: Oh, absolutely fabulous.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: So this week we are talking all about getting started with AI automations and the tools that you might want to use, but what we have created, a five of what we believe are the best, tools to get started for AI automations for your business. So Noel's got a list. He's going to walk us through each one step by step, aren't you, Noel?

Noel: Absolutely, yeah.

Katie: And we are going to explain a little bit about what they do, how you could use them. And we'll also talk about price points or of those free plans and things like that, because I think that's also really important when you are, you know, deciding on what tools to use, you know, cost and return of investment is very important as business owners. So we'll go through all of that as well. So I feel like we should just jump straight into it, if I'm honest.

Noel: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I've got my top five ready and raring to go.

Katie: Okay. And was there a reason why you chose these five? Like, is there a particular theme or reasoning behind it? I feel like that would be quite interesting.

Noel: Yeah. So these are the tools that I use most often. So I've been using AI for over three years. So I've used pretty much every platform that is available. You know, I've given it a go, see what it's like. like. And these are the ones that I kind of stick with and that I would use on a daily basis. And they're also really beginner friendly as well. So, you know, anybody can create an account. Most of these have free plans as well, which is really cool. And, you know, you can just get started straight away and test these things out. So, so yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's been hard to narrow it down to five, but we've got there in the end.

Katie: And that's what we're trying to do, isn't it? Like, it's 2026. A.I. is not going anywhere. It's actually now being introduced into school curriculums as of, I think it was next. I think it's next year, so 2027. So AI's not going anywhere. And what we are all about, isn't it, Nol, is really helping business owners use AI and AI automations in a really efficient way and not just kind of jumping on trends or, you know, those viral posts that you see that yeah what they're saying is interesting and helpful but actually it's not sustainable or it's not long-term help and that's what we're all about and that's like why actually we started our membership AI business club over on the school platform because we we want you to feel confident in using AI and automations. within your business and not have to rely on, you know, PDF downloads, you know, we've all seen them. We want you to be able to go, do you know what, I could figure that out myself or, you know, I could implement that myself or I know exactly what I need to do and maybe I need to get help, but you're not going to like be overcharged or anything like that. And I think that's what's really important to fast isn't it now

Noel: yeah definitely is yeah there's so many applications out there all have their own subscription costs so yeah it can get quite expensive quite quickly if you go crazy on your subscriptions and then yeah half of them you'll probably use once and then never again so yeah hopefully this list to help you narrow down on some of those applications okay

Katie: so let's get end to it and do you want to tell us what your first one is?

Noel: So my first one is Claude. So I've talked about Claude quite a lot on this podcast in the past and it is my number one daily driver large language model that I use every day. It doesn't matter how big or small. You know, my question is it always goes into Claude. And yeah, I guess the reason I've put it in instead of ChatGBT is, I think Open AI and ChatGBTGPT are trying to be the Swiss Army knife of AI. It's kind of the thing that gets everybody into AI because there's like 700 million users a week. You know, so there's a fair few people use it. But when you kind of get to a point after a while that you just think it isn't really for me. And I think for business use cases, Claude is probably fun. far better. And yeah, mainly because of its writing content. Like it, the way it writes its responses and, you know, it all creates newsletters, blog posts, emails, anything of that. You know, it absolutely nails it every single time, which is exactly what you want.

Katie: Yeah, of course it is.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: Yeah, because we were having this conversation earlier, wouldn't we know, we were talking about like, although chat GPT is what gets everyone into AI and gets used to people using it and asking questions and prompt engineering. But actually, I've noticed in the last few weeks that when I've been talking to it, it kind of loses its memory or it gets diluted. So I could be asking it things and then like on the same chat, like, you know, I don't know asking another question, it dilutes or it kind of forget. that's like the conversation that we've just had and I'm finding that more and more recently like almost every time I'm having a conversation with it and yeah it makes me feel quite frustrated because I'm like

Noel: no I already said don't do that or

Katie: like yeah listen to me yeah so yeah it's becoming yeah quite a challenge so I can see why you picked Claude over chat GPT. But what about things like the custom GPTs that people can make for themselves? What would be, you know, a good alternative for that? Is there something that we can do within Claude?

Noel: Yes. So they recently, in the last few months, released skills. And this is a way of like creating instructions which the AI will follow. every time you ask it to use a skill or it can even infer that you should use that skill based on the conversation. So it might be, so I've got a brand guidelines skill set up. So every time I ask it to create content, it knows, or ordinary to use his brand voice. So it goes off, looks at that skill, understands my writing styles and isms and all that sort of stuff that's in that document and then creates the content based on that. So it's very similar to custom GPTs because it's just instructions. And then you're, you know, asking the AI with those additional instructions. So it's kind of the same thing. But the best thing about it over custom GPTs is you could have, you know, you could be in any conversation at any point and then, you know, trigger one of those skills. Whereas a custom GPT, you've got to open up a separate chat session and just talk to that GPT. in its own little bubble. And that's kind of it. So, yeah, a skill you can use anywhere at any time, which is brilliant. So you might not have even thought about writing anything or need anything with your brand voice. But, you know, it could be like 10 minutes, 20 minutes late. You know, actually a LinkedIn post would be really cool for that. And you go, yeah, I'll grab that skill and then, you know, put it in. But yeah, there's also what you don't get with custom GPTs is, kind of like a template or a way to kind of quickly get started and build one. So with Claude Skills, there's actually a skill generation skill. So you can call that and then say, well, you know, use that one and then create me a skill that does X, Y, and Z. This is what I need it to do. And it will go off and create it and you just add it into your account. It's as straightforward as that. So, yeah, anyone can create them really, really, really, straightforward. But yeah,

Katie: they're really powerful. I know we've talked about Claude Skills previously on our podcast, but for anyone who's listening for the first time, like, what can you create as a clawed skill? Can you just give us a couple of really quick examples?

Noel: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of anything where you need, like, we're going to do stuff repetitively. So, you know, you could be creating newsletters. So you'd be like, well, every newsletter I do is in this specific format so you would give it that format and then off it will go and do it the same way every single time you can yeah I think it's a world's your oyster really but it comes to this sort of stuff but yeah there's there's all kinds of things you can do so I would just look at what what you normally ask repressively and then think could I put that in a skill if yes do it and then you know you'll always have that consistent output because One thing I find, especially with chat GPT, is, you know, you'll ask it to do one thing and then you have to, then the week after you then have to start that conversation again, you know, and then rehash it and then finally get what you need. Whereas, yeah, with the skills that's removed, thankfully.

Katie: Yeah. I think now in this current time of filming, which is January 2026, that chat GPT is now like quite a basic business tour and Claude is what business owners are using to stay ahead and to get ahead.

Noel: Yes, definitely. Yeah. A lot of the AI slop that you might see on social media and people flagging it, that's probably come from chat GPT. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Katie: Okay, moving on to the second one, Noel, what have you got for us?

Noel: So the second one, is notebook lm by google and the reason i've put that in is because as businesses you may want to research things or learn new skills or anything like that so what notebook lm allows you to do is just you know have a chat with the AI and say well look this is what I want you to go off from research and you know it'll go off gather loads and loads of sources online and you know you can then chat with those sources so you can have a conversation with it, you know, find out new things or whatever. And then you can then go off and create content. So it could be documents. It could be slides. You can do audio files, videos. There's all kinds of different things that you can then do with all of that data, which is really awesome. So if you need to go off and research anything, then notebook LM is like the real go-to. You know, that's really, really thorough.

Katie: And how would that differ from? Claude?

Noel: So although, yes, Claude can do research. It can do Google searches and stuff like that. What you can do in Notebook LM is add in your own sources as well. So you could say to it, so Claude released co-work the other week. So you could say, well, look, do all the research on this new tool and then, you know, give me all the insights, how they built it, and it will go off and do it. But then you might then spot like a YouTube video talking about it. So you could copy the link from that YouTube video and then put it into your sources. And then it would then go off, you know, read the transcripts and things like that. So, you know, it's really awesome how that sort of works. So yeah, it gives you that ability to, you know, edit those sources. And it makes it really clear as to which ones it's done as well, which is really, really handy. So, yeah, if you think anything's missing, you think, you know, you can add

Katie: that in, manually after, which is pretty awesome. But yeah,

Noel: one of the other big features was kind of like the audio files that you can do. So that's, you know, you could ask it to do research and a question and then you can just go on the audio overview and then listen to an AI generated podcast where they back and forth talk about the particular topic that you've been researching, which is kind of interesting to hear like a two-way conversation about something that you're trying, maybe you're trying to learn something it's like yeah that's you know it can be really really helpful for some

Katie: yeah i quite like that because i think my brain like does like that like if i'm watching a video you know then having a conversation about it obviously you get that deeper learning don't so i feel like actually that would be yeah really useful

Noel: yeah and if you need deeper learning then they you could also add in the quizzes as well so it's got a little quizzes button. So, yeah, if you want, if you're learning it, it'll go off and create those questions so you can go through them, as well as like, what do you call it, the cards.

Katie: Oh, flashcards? Flash cards. That's it.

Noel: Yeah, so you can create those as well, so if you're doing a talk and things out based

Katie: on that research.

Noel: Yeah, really awesome, yeah.

Katie: Will it give you a gold star if you get all of the questions correct? That's what I want to know.

Noel: I've never got them all right. I would never know. Let's say yes. Okay.

Katie: And I should say, as we're talking about these tools or software, we will put everything that we've mentioned in the show notes below for you, so you can go and check them out yourself.

Noel: Mm-hmm. Okay,

Katie: so two done, three to go. So what is the third one?

Noel: So the third one is gamma. And the reason I've put this in is because, like, lots of businesses will need to be creating documents, but that be like proposal, quotations in a similar format every single time. It can get quite monotonous and boring. Or you might have to do, like, presentations to clients and things that. Whereas, so what Gamma does is you can put in your prompt, so it can be as much or as little as you want. and it will then go off and then generate all of these slide contents or documents based on what you've asked for and what's really cool with it is yes it will have a go at it but there might be things you think well a big block of text of this slide's a bit boring so you can select it and then go can you make that more visual and they'll

Katie: go off and then

Noel: add images or add charts based on that particular section of the presentation so yeah it's really quite awesome how it all kind of works and it can really speed up, you know, business processes, which is really, really cool. Big Gamma, it's like it's just so good at saving your time and effort, you know. It can also incorporate your brand guides as well. So let's say you already produce these presentations. You can manually input all of your, you know, fonts and colors and all that sort of stuff, which can be a bit monotonous at the start. You know, you just want to get on and build it. But yeah, if you've, already got a slide deck they also have the feature where you could you know copy an existing presentation in and it will extract all of that information for you so so the next time you then go and use it as the template it's got all of your colors all of your fonts and things like so it's a really good starting point so yeah really awesome awesome tool to use

Katie: brilliant okay and number four

Noel: number four well i'm not sure how this isn't number one of my list, but make.com.

Katie: Would you believe it? I take it then if make.com's number four, that these tools are in no particular order.

Noel: No, well, no, no, no, they're not, no. I did think about ranking them and I thought they're all kind of their own things. So, yeah. But yeah, make.com is an incredible platform. I'm sure if you've listened to any previous episodes of the podcast, I'm sure you've heard me talk about quite a lot. But basically, this platform allows you to create automations in a visual way. So, you know, you can connect thousands of apps together. And your automations can be as simple or as complex as you wish. You know, the only limitation is your imagination, I guess. And you can link into all the AI tools. So anything, AI models from Open AI, Anthropic, Google, GROC, whatever takes you fancy. And yeah, you can just do whatever you wish,

Katie: which is pretty incredible. And you give us some examples, because for anyone who is brand new to AI automations, they might even not know what they can. And we do have podcast episodes on what you can automate. So I would go and check those out. We'll put them in the show notes below for you. But just on this podcast, no, if you could just explain like some of the things that you would maybe want to use,

Noel: make for yeah so I guess one of the a good one would be like a booking agent so let's say you've got a form that somebody fills in on your website and then you basically then want it to go off and you know go off and do an automation to book in a call with that person so you know you would connect your applications together so you could be using something like type form to get the information, and then, yeah, you would then build your automation to then go through, grab a calendar link, and then go off and then use another email module to then send that email to that particular person. But you could go to the next level and kind of like go, well, based on the information they've provided, how can I personalize that message back to them to ensure that they do book a meeting? So you could go off and scrape their website and get that information and maybe even look them up on LinkedIn or whatever, do a bit of low-level stalking just to get a bit more information about that individual. So you can really hyper-personalize what you send at the other end. So that could be one thing. You could do things where you've got like Google sheets with loads of data. So you could be sending, you know, that data through and then get AI to analyze it and then update certain fields with. within your spreadsheet and things like that. So that's all possible. They also have really good AI agents as well. So you can give this agent access to different functionalities in say your CRM, so it could create contacts or it could look them up, things like that. And then you could have a conversation with it and it would then show you the data and have that conversation. So yeah, I would say that AI agents are probably the best in the no-code building sector, which is really awesome. They're really good.

Katie: Awesome.

Noel: Yeah. So that's just some ideas. I mean, there's 3,000 apps that you can connect.

Katie: Yeah. And we do talk about make.com a lot inside of our membership, AI, business club. So if anyone wants any further help with using make, setting up your first automations, we've got a step-by-step process on actually how to do that.

Noel: Yep. And there's even some build guide. as well. So if you've never built anything, there are some step by steps just to get you up and running. It's always good to have some at working at the end of the day.

Katie: Yeah. And if you get stuck or anything, Noel's on hand as well to ask you, ask questions, get support, get help, point you in the right directions or help you fix things.

Noel: Yeah. I may know a thing or two about make.

Katie: Okay, Noel. So what is the last two? tool that you have put on your top five?

Noel: So this last tool is it may be a touch advanced, but anybody can use it. It's not nothing to be scared of. It's Google AI Studio. And what we can do within there is to build applications, whether that be mobile or web. And, you know, we can build it for any use case. So, you know, it could be like an internal tool for you and your team. So it would help you speed up processes or whatever you need to do or maybe you just want to create like a really cool image generation platform using nano banana to your specific style. You could do that as well either. That just lives in your account and only you get to use it. That's fine either. You don't have to publish it. But you can create any kind of app and you have like full access to the Google ecosystem. So it's not just their AI tools. So you've got like your V-O-3 for video, nano-banana, you've then got all the Gemini models. But then you also get access to things like Google Maps. That's all, you know, seamlessly integrated. So when you're chatting with the agent to build that application and you say, well, I'd like a Google Maps for this bit, it can then, it already knows the code snippets already, you know, it's already been trained on that information, so it could just bring it in straight away. So for a customer I was working with the other week, they were like, oh, it would be really cool, you know, in our invoitation process, if this app, you know, we put in the postcode and it showed us the nearest five hotels and got prices so we could, you know, put that within our costumes. And I was like, yeah, sure, can do that and then within five minutes it was done yeah it's just like that would have took hours and hours and hours you know trying

Katie: to find

Noel: GitHub repositories or stack overflow or go through Reddit trying to find how to do that sort of thing as

Katie: a home

Noel: code but yeah you don't have to be a coder at all to be able to use Google AI Studio it's just really awesome It's free to use as well, which is great. And they always put in their latest tools as well. So if a new version of Nano Banana comes out, you can test it within that environment and then see what it's like. You know, you might really, you might be thinking, well, that's, it's all right, but I won't bother changing a current application. You can do whatever you wish.

Katie: Hmm, that sounds really good. Excellent choices. So what I think now would be really helpful if we go through the costings of, you know, each software or tool that you have mentioned in your top five.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: So let's start with the first one. So Claude. So we know that there is a free version.

Noel: There is a free version of Claude, yeah. And there's also two pay plans. So you've got Pro and Max. And they're priced at, I believe it's £19 per month and then £90 per month. Yeah, I'm not sure about the dollar rates. I did try and look that up, but as why laptops localised to the UK, it was like, no, I'm just going to tell you pounds, but I believe it's like $100 for the big plan. Yeah. But really, all you're getting is you're going up is earlier access to new tools. So like I say, they released co-work last week. So that went to the max users first. And I was kind of expecting that to be for at least a month, but it was like four days and then it came down to the pro plan. Well, yeah, I guess, you know, we're paying for that usage. So, yeah, we might as all have it. It worked, which is good. So, yeah, you also get extended usage. So I find that Claude, although it's great, it does restrict you a little bit in terms of your usage. Chatchipit is probably a bit more fluid and lets you have more conversations. But, yeah, Claude is a little bit more restricted. So, yeah.

Katie: Hmm. Okay. Okay. Okay. Second one, Notebook LLM.

Noel: So, yeah, notebook LLM is, again, free to use. You can just log in with a normal Google account and off you go. There are, obviously, of course, there's going to be usage limits with that. So with this one and also the Google AI Studio is kind of interlinked. So they're part of like the Google Gemini ecosystem. So if you upgrade your Gemini account, to the pay plan, I think it's like £9 per month, then that gives you then extra access to notebook LM so you can have more queries per day, per week or whatever. And it kind of works again with AI Studio, so you get extra usage limits. But yeah, they've got a crazy plan, which is, I think it's £235 per month, which is their, like, top tier,

Katie: all singing

Noel: or dancing plan with loads of usage limits. and it's like, yeah, I'm sure I'm going to pay for that.

Katie: It would be better, like, for larger businesses.

Noel: Definitely, yeah, more on the enterprise level. But yeah, to get started, it's free. And then you get paid plans, pretty cheap to start off.

Katie: Okay, great.

Noel: Yeah.

Katie: And then the other

Noel: one is

Katie: Make.

Noel: Yeah. So with Make, they have a really generous free plan. So you get 1,000 credits to use per month. So if you have like a three, step process and you run it, that's going to use three credits. That's kind of how it works. So, yeah, if you just want to test it out, you know, you've got plenty of headroom to build something really complicated or even really simple. It doesn't really matter, you know, do whatever you wish. So, you know, it gives you plenty to play with. And then the first pay plan comes in at $9 and that then gives you 10,000 operations per month, which is usually plenty for anybody. So, yeah, more than enough to get started with. But compare those 10,000 credits with something like Zapier, that would cost you around $89 a month. So, yeah, really, really good value for money.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: An excellent app.

Katie: Yeah. And we've also done a podcast episode on like Make versus Zapier. So again, we'll put that in the show notes below. so people can check that out as well.

Noel: Absolutely, yeah. It's a good one that one.

Katie: Okay. So there we have it. That was Noel's top five AI tools and software to use for your small business in 2026. And if you've got any questions or there's something that you would like us to address or answer on the podcast, we'll leave our email address below. If you're just putting the subject heading podcast, we will try our very best to answer it for you. But we've got lots of amazing episodes lined up for you this year. We're really excited about where we're taking the podcast in 2026. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. And if you liked it, we would love it if you could leave us a review. And we will catch you next time very soon.