The Most Useful AI Tools Right Now in 2026
A YouTuber and content creator shares the AI tools he uses daily in 2026, ranked from most to least frequent use. The tools span search, writing, coding, meeting notes, voice synthesis, and news aggregation. He emphasizes practical productivity gains over theoretical AI potential.
Summary
The video is a personal walkthrough of the AI tools a content creator and YouTuber actively uses in his daily workflow as of 2026, presented roughly in order of most to least frequent use.
Perplexity AI tops the list as a full replacement for Google Search, used constantly throughout the day for everything from camera settings to comparing AI models. He uses it primarily through the Comet browser, which has Perplexity built into the URL bar. A standout feature he highlights is Comet's slash command system, which lets him trigger pre-written prompts instantly — one for summarizing news articles and another for filtering useful feedback from YouTube comments, bypassing troll comments automatically.
Claude.ai is his primary chatbot for creative and brainstorming work. He uses it on the Max plan and prefers it over ChatGPT because it is less sycophantic and more willing to deliver honest feedback. He has built out several Claude Projects, most notably a 'YouTube Producer' project fed with CSV exports of his YouTube analytics, allowing Claude to make data-informed suggestions about titles, thumbnails, and video strategy. He also uses a personal journal project where he pastes diary entries and has back-and-forth reflective conversations.
Whisper Flow is a background tool that converts voice to text while cleaning up filler words, repeated phrases, and verbal tics in real time. He uses it extensively while prompting AI tools and writing code in Cursor.
Cursor is his AI coding environment, used to build personal bespoke tools including his mattwolf.com website, a journaling app, a business command center dashboard, a thumbnail generator, and a video titler app. He argues this trend of building small personal software tools — rather than commercial SaaS products — represents a major shift in how people will use AI.
Nano Banana (accessed via Gemini) is his image generation tool, used iteratively to create YouTube thumbnails through multi-step prompting until the output meets his standards.
YouTube Studio's built-in 'Ask Studio' AI feature allows him to query his own channel analytics conversationally, surfacing insights like which older videos are still driving subscriber growth.
Feedly serves as his AI-powered news aggregator. Beyond standard RSS feeds from company blogs, the AI Web Alerts feature proactively surfaces relevant AI news from sources he never subscribed to, and learns his preferences over time to refine the feed.
Granola is a recently adopted meeting notes tool that runs silently in the background, transcribes conversations, tracks action items for all participants, and contextualizes rough hand-typed notes using the meeting transcript. He replaced a complex manual workflow involving OBS, Assembly AI, and Claude with this single tool.
Finally, ElevenLabs is used weekly rather than daily. He has trained a voice clone that his podcast producer uses to generate ad reads for the HubSpot-owned podcast 'The Next Wave,' eliminating the need for him to record sponsorship segments himself.
Key Insights
- The creator replaced a multi-step manual workflow — recording meetings with OBS, transcribing with Assembly AI, then summarizing with Claude — with Granola, a single background tool that does all of it automatically, after a friend pointed out the redundancy.
- He fed Claude's YouTube Producer project CSV exports of his actual YouTube analytics, allowing the AI to make data-grounded recommendations about titles and thumbnails rather than generic suggestions.
- He argues that AI's most underappreciated use case is building small, personal bespoke software tools to eliminate individual bottlenecks — not commercial SaaS products, but private utility apps that solve specific workflow problems.
- He prefers Claude over ChatGPT specifically because Claude is less sycophantic — less likely to say things like 'That's an excellent question' — and more likely to tell him what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear.
- He granted his podcast producer access to his ElevenLabs voice clone so that ad reads for the HubSpot podcast 'The Next Wave' are now generated entirely without his involvement, replacing the process of sending him scripts to record.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] All right, I'm just going to get straight to it. These are the AI tools that I use myself on a daily basis. It's the most common question I get asked, so I figured I'd make a video and break it all down for you. Now, these are kind of sort of in the order I use them from most to least. And I've got to start with Perplexity cuz it's the one that I definitely use the most. Now, I am on the Perplexity Pro plan myself, but I don't think it's necessary. I think you'll find Perplexity just as useful if you're not on the pro plan. But for me, this has essentially become a [0:30] replacement…
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