Which AI Assistant Is Best for Your Work? It Depends on What You Need It To Do
If you’re responsible for people, productivity, or performance, you’ve likely heard names like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity thrown around.
They’re all billed as ‘intelligent assistants’, but in practical terms, how are they different? More importantly, which one makes sense for your organisation?
This is a workflow decision. And if you're the one who’ll be held accountable for outcomes, you need more than hype. You need the real differences explained in plain English especially if you're still building your AI foundations.
Here's the simplest way to think about it. These tools fall into the same general category—AI assistants—but they work quite differently:
- ChatGPT (OpenAI) is good at structured tasks and reliable for writing, summarising, and reasoning. If you use the paid version (GPT-4), it also includes tools for code, images, web browsing, and document analysis. It’s ideal if you need a consistent all-rounder for knowledge work.
- Claude (Anthropic) handles long documents better than any other model right now. You can throw in entire reports, PDF policies, or transcripts and it will reason over them cleanly. That makes it useful in public sector, compliance, HR, or legal-adjacent work.
- Gemini (Google) is still catching up in consistency and interface experience, but it integrates tightly with Google Workspace. If your org runs on Docs, Sheets, and Slides, it’s worth a look—especially if you want it embedded directly into day-to-day tools.
- Perplexity acts more like a research assistant. It pulls from the web in real time, ranks sources, and gives clear citations. It’s quick and responsive, but doesn’t do deep reasoning as well as the others.
Here’s the key: what you need it to do determines what’s ‘best’.
If you want to:
- Build AI into standard operating procedures
- Extract insights from policies or PDFs
- Create slides, draft comms, or prep board notes
- Automate answers to routine staff or customer queries
…then your choice should match the job. Not the marketing.
Once you understand how these assistants differ, the fear of “falling behind” starts to fade. Instead, you start asking better questions:
- What are the actual tasks we want AI to support?
- Where does each tool fit into our existing stack?
- What are the risks—accuracy, privacy, change fatigue?
- And what are the capability gaps we need to close first?
The biggest trap is thinking you need to decide on a tool before you understand how your teams will use it. The goal isn’t to crown a winner—it’s to reduce friction and create value in how people work.
One of our clients, a mid-sized local government council, came to us overwhelmed by AI choices. Their comms team wanted ChatGPT. Their strategy team preferred Claude. IT was trialling Gemini in Gmail. Nobody had a shared understanding of use cases.
We stripped it back: What workflows were most repetitive? Which ones were error-prone or people-intensive?
Turns out they didn’t need to choose one tool, they needed a structure for how to assess use, manage access, and upskill staff across multiple options. Now they’re running experiments, collecting feedback, and tying AI trials directly to performance metrics.
Want to make smarter choices about AI tools without wasting time or money?
Start with the foundations. Our AI Fundamentals Masterclass gives you the clarity, language, and structure to lead confidently—no tech background needed.
- Understand what tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity can do
- Learn how to assess value, risks, and fit
- Build shared literacy across teams
- Avoid the chaos of disconnected pilots
Book your seat.
Get the fundamentals right before your next AI decision gets made for you.