AI Cheat Sheet: AI Tools to 20x Your Value
TL;DR: Most executives waste AI on gimmicky stuff. The right tools don’t just “save time” , they multiply your leverage. With them, you cut due diligence from days to hours, turn meetings into action, produce board-ready decks in minutes, and see business data as decisions, not spreadsheets. This cheat sheet covers the 20 tools that we think matter most: what they are, how to use them, and the commercial value they unlock if you’re responsible for people and P&L.
AI for Execs
If you’re leading a services business, government department, or corporate unit, you already feel the squeeze: more reporting, tighter margins, less time to think.
AI can’t remove the weight of leadership. What it can do is strip away the waste: the half-day of research before a meeting, the five hours turning notes into slides, the constant ping-pong of diary logistics.
These AI tools let you do your real job: deciding, communicating, and leading, without drowning in admin or base and repetitive tasks.
The AI Game Changers
Research & Insight
1. Comet (Perplexity) – AI Browser
Cuts research cycles. Summarises competitor data, industry trends, and regulatory updates in real time.
Executive value: Faster due diligence, cleaner briefings, better-prepared decisions.
2. Claude (Anthropic) – Deep Reasoning
Handles long, complex documents with logic and safety.
Executive value: You don’t wait weeks for teams to digest contracts or policy papers — you see risks and options the same day.
3. ChatGPT (OpenAI) – Versatile Utility
Drafts, brainstorms, analyses, and connects with systems.
Executive value: Speeches, memos, and strategy notes move from blank page to credible draft in minutes, freeing you for refinement and delivery.
Productivity & People
4. Granola – Meeting Notes
Transcribes and turns discussions into tasks, decisions, and risks.
Executive value: Accountability is instant. No more “what did we agree?” moments that stall delivery.
5. Wispr Flow / 6. Willow – Voice Dictation
Accurate dictation with context awareness.
Executive value: Commutes and corridors become productive time. Over a quarter, that’s days of regained capacity.
7. Gamma – Decks, Docs, and Sites
Transforms notes into professional slides or documents.
Executive value: Board-ready content in hours, not days. Cuts consultant reliance and keeps decisions moving.
8. Lindy – Workflow Agents
Runs reminders, scheduling, and repetitive processes in the background.
Executive value: Removes leadership drag. You stay in strategy, not diary wrangling.
9. Julius AI – Data Analyst
Turns spreadsheets into dashboards and insights.
Executive value: Finance, ops, and HR data become patterns and calls to action, not noise. Decisions move faster.
10. Superhuman – Inbox Management
AI sorting and summarisation for email.
Executive value: Critical messages surface, threads compress, and inbox fatigue drops. Responsiveness improves without extra hours.
11. Happenstance – AI People Search
Maps networks and relationships.
Executive value: Faster hiring, sharper stakeholder analysis, and more targeted business development.
Audience & Influence
12. Delphi – Clone Your Expertise
Replicates your style and knowledge into scalable outputs.
Executive value: Client engagement and internal training scale without diluting your voice.
13. HeyGen – AI Avatars
Generates avatars for scalable video content.
Executive value: Speeds up staff comms, training, and client updates — no studio or endless retakes.
14. Overlap – Multimodal Video Agents
Builds richer video from varied inputs.
Executive value: Creates investor updates, project briefs, or campaign videos quickly with context.
15. Captions – Talking Video Editor
Auto-subtitles, edits, and formats.
Executive value: Professional talking-head video in minutes, useful for leadership comms or thought leadership.
Product & Market
16. Cursor – AI Code Editor
Accelerates software builds.
Executive value: Prototypes and internal tools ship quickly without needing a big dev team.
17. Replit – Apps From Plain Language
Describe an app; get working code.
Executive value: You can test ideas with clients or staff in days, not quarters.
18. Anychat.one – Unified AI Access
Connects multiple models in one interface.
Executive value: Flexibility to pick the right AI for the job without chasing 10 subscriptions.
19. Windsurf – AI Autocomplete for Code
Improves developer speed.
Executive value: Your tech team spends less time typing boilerplate and more time on differentiation.
Creativity & Engagement
20. ElevenLabs – AI Voice Generation
Creates natural voices for narration, training, or comms.
Executive value: Turns staff onboarding, compliance training, or client updates into professional audio assets without production cost.
Use this AI stack
- Pick one per category. Don’t overwhelm yourself or your team.
- Run 4-week pilots. Tie each to a metric: hours saved, error rate cut, or turnaround time improved.
- Log everything. Prompts, errors, outputs. That log is your compliance shield and learning base.
- Scale only what works. If a pilot saves time or sharpens delivery, standardise it. If not, stop and switch.
FAQs
Q1: How do I stop staff using AI off the books?
Give them approved tools and guardrails. Shadow adoption fades when leadership provides sanctioned options. Actually...this is a hard one, your staff are already using it, it is too late.
Q2: What’s the right first tool to deploy?
Granola (meetings into actions) or Julius (data into dashboards). Both show visible ROI in week one.
Q3: Do I need new roles to manage these tools?
Not at the start. Assign ownership to existing managers. Expand later only if usage scales.
Q4: How do I measure ROI without extra systems?
Track three numbers: hours saved, turnaround time, and reduced error rate. These map directly to cost and margin.
Q5: What’s the governance risk if I move too fast?
Unlogged outputs. Without audit trails, you can’t defend decisions. Require every AI tool to record prompts, sources, and reviewers.
Q6: How do I avoid overwhelming my team?
Phase adoption. One tool per workflow. Don’t “launch AI”; fix one pain point, prove value, and build momentum.
AI tools add value because they compound your capacity as a leader: compressing research, turning meetings into actions, cutting the lag in comms, and surfacing decisions from raw data. FAST.
Pick the right stack and you scale yourself.
That’s exactly why we built the AI Fundamentals Masterclass: to show executives where to start, which tools pay off, and how to govern them safely. If you carry responsibility for people, clients, or P&L...consider jumping on it.