The Low Hanging Fruit: AI Tools Worth Your Time Right Now

I'm not going to sit here and tell you AI is going to transform your industry. You've heard that enough. What I will tell you is that there are a handful of tools sitting right in front of you — tools that take about 20 minutes to set up — that will change the way you work, and honestly, the way you think. And if you're running a business in Ontario and you're not using at least a couple of these, you're leaving real time and money on the table.

Here's what's actually in my stack right now.

Wispr Flow: Stop Typing Everything

This one's simple. You press a shortcut, you talk, it writes. In your email. In Claude. In a Slack message. Wherever. It cleans up your words in real-time — no filler words, no run-ons, just clean text that sounds like you on a good day.

I use it mostly for ripping in prompts to Claude and knocking out quick emails and texts. If you think faster than you type (you do), this removes that bottleneck. Speaking is roughly four times faster than typing, and Wispr Flow is the best version of that concept I've found. There's a free tier that gives you a feel for it, and the Pro plan is around $15/month if you decide it's worth keeping — which it is.

Claude Code: Stop Paying for Lovable, Replit, and Bolt

So basically you can code in english now, and there is quite a few ways to do so.

Lovable, Bolt, and Replit are all hovering around $20+ per month each. And they're fine — great, even, for quickly spinning up a prototype or generating a UI. But they eat through credits fast, especially when you're iterating on anything complex. You'll hit a wall, and then you're either paying more or starting over.

Claude Code is different. It runs from your terminal (terminal is like MS Word for coders, its where they work) , it has access to your full codebase, and it builds like a developer would — not like a web app that generates code snippets and hopes for the best. I'm a non-technical person. Sales background, MBA, antithesis of a software engineer. And I spent a few hours with Claude Code and came out with a functional CRM — sequencing, AI features, the whole thing — for essentially the price of my Claude subscription. No HubSpot. No Salesforce. No $12k implementation fee.

After months of using this tool and similar ones, I am a highly technical person. It has been a massive unlock in my career. I have been learning AI tools in general for 3 years and it has broadened and sharpened my strengths as a professional. But I am telling you, Claude Code has allowed me to learn and produce at an accelerated pace. Mastering it has been the biggest breakthrough in my career since I mastered the OG Chat GPT years ago.

Yes, the setup of claude code is intimidating, it is difficult. But you learn it once, and then English is effectively your coding language. That's not an exaggeration. It's just true now.

For Ontario business owners who've been told they need to hire a developer or buy expensive software to get a custom internal tool — you don't. Take the time to install Claude Code and thank yourself later.

AI Image Generation: Worth Learning for the Fun of It

A few image generation tools have earned a place in my rotation — Grok, Sora, and Gemini. Each one is worth a few hours of your time, and not just for practical reasons.

The interesting thing is they each have real, distinct strengths. If you want to build a consistent brand character — same face, same look, image after image — Sora handles that well because you can anchor to a reference. Some of the other tools are great for one-off creative work but struggle to maintain consistency across prompts. Knowing that difference before you spend an afternoon frustrated with the wrong tool matters.

And beyond the practical use, there's something about playing with image generation that gets you out of your head. It's creative in a way that spreadsheets and email never were (see Grok generated image above)

The Real Point

Previous generations of "learning a business tool" meant getting good at Excel or PowerPoint. That meant learning something that was genuinely difficult — and frankly, if you got really good at Excel, you were basically learning to code anyway.

The barrier now is so much lower. And more importantly, it's actually enjoyable. There's a creative dimension to finding the right tool for the right problem that didn't exist before. The ROI isn't always obvious at the start, it takes work and guidance. But once you find one thing that saves you an 15 hours a week, it changes how you look at everything else. If you are interested in anything I have written, and you think we could give your business a competitive advantage, why not set up a call?

Thanks for reading.