by John Parkins
The picture at the top of this post was made with ChatGPT. I'm saying that first because most of the marketing people I know would not.
That's the part of this whole conversation I keep getting stuck on. A lot of agency owners use AI every day and act like they don't. They're worried a client will hear it and think the work isn't worth what they paid. I get the worry. I just think hiding it is the wrong move. The work is worth what it's worth because of the brain behind it, not because of which keyboard shortcuts you did or didn't use.
Anyway. Here's what I actually use. Five tools. Most days I touch all five.
One rule before the list
I don't use AI to do the work for me. I use it to keep up with the work I'm already doing. There's a real difference and it matters.
If I hand a tool a blank prompt and say "write me a marketing plan for a hardware store," I get garbage. If I do the thinking first and use the tool to move faster on the parts that drain me, I get something useful. The brain has to come from me. The speed comes from the stack.
Claude is doing the most
Of the five, Claude is the one I lean on hardest right now. It has four pieces that play together, and that's the part that matters. Chat, Design, Code, and Cowork. Each one does a different job. Used together they do something none of them do alone.
Most recent example. I built a full lead funnel for the agency over the last few weeks. Chat helped me brainstorm and lay the roadmap out. Design made the landing page art and the social pieces. Code stitched the whole thing together as a working site. And Cowork is running on top of it now, watching the analytics, telling me what's working and what isn't, so I don't have to remember to log in and check.
Four jobs. One platform. I'm not aware of another tool right now that gets close to that. If you want to see what that kind of build looks like for your business, that's the Digital Squad's bread and butter.
ChatGPT, mostly for pictures now
ChatGPT was my first real LLM. I started with it back when it was the only one most people had heard of. These days the writing tools have other contenders and I tend to draft in Claude. But for images, ChatGPT is still where I go first. The hero illustration on this post. Spot art for client decks. Mockups for a Facebook ad when I want to see something fast.
Gemini is going to leapfrog them on images soon. They keep leapfrogging each other, every couple of months. I'm just along for the ride.
Gemini, because it lives inside my email
Gemini is baked into Google Workspace. That's the whole pitch. It's in the place where I'm already working, so I don't have to switch tabs to get value out of it.
The meeting notes are the part my clients thank me for. After every video call we both get a summary, with each of our own action items listed out. They love it. I love it. Then I take those notes and feed them into a second-brain dump I built with Claude Code that keeps me honest about what I committed to. My ADHD brain doesn't slow down. Without something catching the action items, half of them would walk out the door with the client.
The inbox triage is the other piece. It searches my email better than I can.
Perplexity is the one on my phone
Anything that pops into my head, I'm reaching for Perplexity. How does this thing work. What does that word mean. Why did they build it that way. Is there a better way to do this. My brain doesn't stop, and Perplexity is the closest thing I've found to a tool that doesn't get tired of the question.
I started using it back when Claude and ChatGPT couldn't search the web. They can now. I still use Perplexity. Something about the way it answers a question fits the way I ask them.
ElevenLabs, which most people haven't tried
This is the one I think small business owners are sleeping on. Text to voice. Text to video. Voiceovers for a social post that sound like a real person.
A couple weeks ago I used it to make a jingle for BeyondVivid. Caribbean vibe, "where brands shine brighter" as the hook. Catchy. Took me an afternoon. Ten years ago I would have paid a thousand bucks for something that sounded like that, assuming I could find someone in Lima who'd make it. That's the leap people miss when they argue about whether AI is overhyped. The hype is real for some things, not real for others. This is one of the real ones.
What's it cost?
About $250 to $270 a month for all five. I'm on the Max plan with Claude right now because I have several large projects running. Once those wrap I'll drop to a lower tier and the number will come down.
For what it does, it's a steal. One freelancer for one small project usually runs more than the whole stack costs me for a month.
Where would I start if I were you?
I wouldn't try to use all five. Not at first.
Pick one thing in your week that drains you. Could be writing the weekly email. Could be answering the same question from a customer for the tenth time. Could be making images for social posts. Take that one thing and try one tool on it for a week. If it helps, you've found your first one. If it doesn't, try a different tool on the same job. The mistake I see small business owners make is signing up for four tools at once, getting overwhelmed, and concluding AI doesn't work for them. It works. You just have to start narrow.
And if you want a hand thinking through which one fits your business, that's a conversation we have all the time. Reach out. No pitch deck, no pressure. Just a call to talk it through.
One last thing
I said it earlier but it's worth saying again. AI doesn't know your client's business. It doesn't know what your gut is telling you about a logo direction. It doesn't know what the woman at the chamber of commerce lunch said about her cousin's roofing company last Thursday. You bring that. The tools just help you move faster on the parts where speed matters.
If anyone tells you their marketing is "powered by AI," ask them what they mean. The honest answer is some version of what I just told you. Five tools. Used carefully. To get more done in a day than I could without them. That's it. That's the whole secret.
