Over the past six months, our team at Point Academy has tested more than 40 AI tools across real UK businesses, from a five-person recruitment agency in Bristol to a 200-seat financial services firm in the City. Some tools were brilliant. Others were expensive disappointments.

This guide covers the best AI tools for business: the 15 that actually earned their keep. We have grouped them by what they do, included UK pricing where it exists, and been honest about where each one falls short. If you are still figuring out how AI fits into your business, start there first. This list assumes you already know you want to start using these tools and just need help picking the right ones.

A quick note on pricing: most AI tools charge in US dollars, which is annoying. We have converted to GBP at the time of writing, but check the latest rates before you commit.

AI assistants (general purpose)

These do a bit of everything: writing, analysis, brainstorming, research. If your team is going to pay for one AI tool, it should probably be one of these.

1. ChatGPT (OpenAI)

What it does: General-purpose AI assistant. Handles writing, analysis, coding, image generation, and web search. The Plus plan gives you access to GPT-4o and the newer reasoning models.

Best for: Teams that need a versatile, all-round AI tool. Works well for marketing, operations, HR, and finance.

UK pricing: Plus plan is around £16/month per user. Team plan is roughly £20/month per user (billed annually) with admin controls and shared workspaces.

Pros:

  • The most capable general-purpose model, especially for creative and analytical tasks
  • Enormous plugin and GPT store ecosystem
  • Image generation built in (DALL-E)
  • Web browsing and file analysis work reliably now

Cons:

  • Can be confidently wrong, especially with UK-specific regulations and tax rules
  • The free tier is quite limited these days
  • Data privacy settings need careful configuration for business use. Check the enterprise data policy

Verdict: Still the default recommendation for most UK businesses. If you are only going to pay for one AI tool, this is probably it. But do not treat its outputs as gospel. Always verify anything involving numbers, legal matters, or compliance.

2. Claude (Anthropic)

What it does: AI assistant with a particular strength in handling long documents, careful analysis, and nuanced writing. The extended context window means it can process entire reports, contracts, and policy documents in one go.

Best for: Professional services, legal teams, consultancies, and anyone who works with lengthy documents. Also strong for businesses that need more careful outputs rather than quick-fire responses.

UK pricing: Pro plan is around £16/month. Team plan around £24/month per user.

Pros:

  • Handles very long documents without losing the thread (we fed it a 90-page tender document and it produced a genuinely useful summary)
  • Tends to be more measured and less prone to making things up
  • Strong at following complex, multi-step instructions
  • Better than competitors at acknowledging when it does not know something

Cons:

  • Smaller plugin ecosystem than ChatGPT
  • No built-in image generation
  • Can be overly cautious sometimes, refusing to help with things that are perfectly reasonable

Verdict: Our pick for professional services and any business dealing with complex documents. The quality of analysis is noticeably better for serious work. Several of our course participants have switched to Claude for client-facing work and not looked back.

3. Microsoft Copilot

What it does: AI assistant integrated directly into Microsoft 365: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Sits inside the tools you already use.

Best for: Businesses already running Microsoft 365 who want AI without changing their workflow. Particularly strong for companies that live in Excel and Outlook.

UK pricing: Copilot for Microsoft 365 is £24.70/user/month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription. That adds up quickly.

Pros:

  • Lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, so no context-switching
  • Excellent at drafting emails in Outlook based on previous threads
  • Excel integration is genuinely useful for formula generation and data analysis
  • PowerPoint slide generation saves real time, even if the designs need tweaking
  • Data stays within your Microsoft tenant, which makes compliance teams happier

Cons:

  • Expensive when you multiply it across a whole team
  • Quality is inconsistent. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes bafflingly wrong
  • The Teams meeting summary feature is decent but misses nuance
  • You need a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Enterprise plan first

Verdict: If your company already pays for Microsoft 365 and your team lives in Outlook and Excel, this is worth piloting with 5-10 users before rolling out widely. The per-seat cost means you need to be selective about who actually needs it. Check our AI for small business guide for tips on managing costs.

4. Google Gemini

What it does: Google’s AI assistant, deeply integrated into Google Workspace: Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet.

Best for: Businesses running Google Workspace. Strong for email-heavy workflows and collaborative document editing.

UK pricing: Gemini Business is around £17/user/month. Gemini Enterprise is roughly £27/user/month.

Pros:

  • Tight integration with Gmail is its standout feature: draft replies, summarise threads, find information across your inbox
  • Google Docs integration feels natural for collaborative teams
  • Competitive pricing compared to Copilot
  • NotebookLM (included) is brilliant for research and synthesising multiple sources

Cons:

  • Google Sheets AI is weaker than Excel Copilot for complex analysis
  • Not as strong as ChatGPT or Claude for standalone tasks outside the Google ecosystem
  • The standalone Gemini app is decent but not best-in-class

Verdict: The obvious choice for Google Workspace shops. The Gmail integration alone justifies the cost for email-heavy businesses. If you are not already in the Google ecosystem, this is not reason enough to switch.

Writing and content

5. Grammarly

What it does: AI writing assistant that checks grammar, tone, clarity, and style. The AI features now go beyond corrections. It can rewrite paragraphs, adjust tone, and generate drafts.

Best for: Any business where written communication matters. Particularly useful for non-native English speakers and teams that produce lots of client-facing copy.

UK pricing: Free tier covers basics. Premium is around £10/month. Business plan is roughly £12/user/month.

Pros:

  • Works everywhere: browser extension, desktop app, Microsoft Office, Google Docs
  • Tone detection is genuinely helpful for client emails
  • The AI rewrite suggestions have improved massively over the past year
  • British English support actually works properly (unlike some tools that default to American spellings)

Cons:

  • The free tier is very limited now, feels like a teaser
  • Suggestions can be overly aggressive with shorter, punchier writing styles
  • Does not understand specialist jargon well, so legal and medical teams will find it annoying

Verdict: Solid and dependable. It catches things that matter. If your team sends a lot of external emails and proposals, the Business plan pays for itself quickly. Just teach your team to ignore it when it tries to simplify their technical writing.

6. Jasper

What it does: AI content generation platform focused on marketing copy: blog posts, social media, ads, email campaigns, and landing pages.

Best for: Marketing teams and agencies that produce a high volume of content. Also useful for small businesses without a dedicated copywriter.

UK pricing: Creator plan starts at around £32/month. Pro plan is roughly £48/month. Business plans are custom-priced.

Pros:

  • Brand voice feature is genuinely useful. Feed it your style guide and it stays consistent
  • Template library covers most marketing formats
  • Good at producing first drafts that need 20% editing rather than 80%
  • Integration with Surfer SEO helps with search optimisation

Cons:

  • Expensive for what it is, especially compared to ChatGPT with a good prompt
  • Outputs can feel formulaic after a while
  • Not great for anything outside marketing copy. Do not use it for reports or technical writing

Verdict: Worth it if your team produces content at scale and you need brand consistency. For most small businesses, ChatGPT or Claude with a well-crafted system prompt will do 80% of what Jasper does for a fraction of the cost.

7. Otter.ai

What it does: AI meeting transcription and note-taking. Joins your calls (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet), records them, transcribes in real time, and generates summaries with action items.

Best for: Consultancies, sales teams, and anyone who spends half their life in meetings. Particularly valuable for teams that need accurate records of client conversations.

UK pricing: Pro plan is around £13/month. Business plan is roughly £16/user/month.

Pros:

  • Transcription accuracy is impressive, even with British accents (we tested with a Glaswegian colleague and it managed)
  • Automatic meeting summaries save genuine time
  • Action item extraction actually works most of the time
  • Search across all your meeting transcripts is surprisingly useful

Cons:

  • Some clients are uncomfortable being recorded, so always ask permission
  • Struggles with heavy jargon and acronyms specific to your industry
  • The free tier is limited to 300 minutes per month

Verdict: One of those tools where the value is immediately obvious. If your team has more than five meetings a week, the time saved on note-taking and follow-ups justifies the subscription within the first month.

Data and analytics

If your business makes decisions based on data (and it should), these tools are worth a serious look. For a deeper take on how AI is changing this space, read our piece on how AI is replacing traditional BI tools. If you work as a business analyst, our AI for business analysts guide covers practical prompts and workflows for getting the most from these tools in a BA role.

8. Julius AI

What it does: Upload a spreadsheet or CSV, then ask questions about your data in plain English. It analyses, creates charts, runs statistical tests, and explains what it finds.

Best for: Small and mid-sized businesses that need data insights but do not have a dedicated analyst. Also brilliant for finance teams drowning in spreadsheets.

UK pricing: Free tier with limited usage. Pro plan is around £16/month.

Pros:

  • Genuinely understands messy, real-world spreadsheets, not just clean demo data
  • Chart generation is fast and the outputs look professional enough for board presentations
  • Explains its working, which helps you catch mistakes
  • Handles multiple files and can cross-reference between them

Cons:

  • Struggles with very large datasets (over 100,000 rows can be slow)
  • Statistical analysis covers the basics but will not replace a proper data scientist for complex work
  • Limited integration options, mostly manual upload

Verdict: If you have ever spent two hours trying to build a pivot table in Excel, Julius will feel like a gift. Ideal for SMEs. Larger businesses with Power BI or Tableau already in place probably do not need it.

9. Tableau with AI (Tableau Pulse and Einstein)

What it does: Visual analytics platform with AI features that automatically surface insights, explain trends, and generate natural language summaries of your data.

Best for: Mid-size to large businesses with existing data infrastructure. Strong for companies that need to make data accessible to non-technical teams.

UK pricing: Tableau Creator is around £56/user/month. Viewer licences are cheaper at roughly £12/user/month. Einstein AI features may require additional Salesforce licensing.

Pros:

  • Tableau Pulse delivers automated, personalised data insights to each user
  • The AI-generated explanations of trends are surprisingly useful for executive reporting
  • Visualisation quality is still best-in-class
  • If you are already in the Salesforce ecosystem, the integration is smooth

Cons:

  • Expensive, especially once you factor in the full Salesforce stack
  • Learning curve is steep. This is not something you set up on a Friday afternoon
  • AI features feel bolted on compared to newer tools
  • Requires clean, well-structured data to shine

Verdict: Still the gold standard for visual analytics, and the AI features are getting better. But unless you already have Tableau or Salesforce, starting from scratch is a big commitment. Consider Julius or Power BI first.

10. Power BI with Copilot

What it does: Microsoft’s business intelligence tool, now with Copilot AI that lets you create reports, ask questions about your data, and generate insights using natural language.

Best for: Businesses already in the Microsoft ecosystem. Particularly strong for finance, operations, and leadership reporting.

UK pricing: Power BI Pro is around £8.40/user/month (included in some Microsoft 365 plans). Premium starts at roughly £16.70/user/month. Copilot in Power BI requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence on top.

Pros:

  • Natural language Q&A actually works well. Ask a question, get a chart
  • Tight integration with Excel, Azure, and the rest of the Microsoft stack
  • Report generation through Copilot saves hours of manual work
  • Strong governance and security features that IT departments appreciate

Cons:

  • Copilot features require the expensive Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on
  • Performance can be sluggish with large datasets on Pro tier
  • The desktop app is clunky compared to the web experience
  • Requires proper data modelling to get good results. Garbage in, garbage out

Verdict: If you are a Microsoft shop, Power BI is the natural choice for BI. The Copilot features are genuinely useful but the additional licensing cost is hard to swallow for smaller teams. For alternatives, our BI tools article covers the full picture.

Customer service

11. Intercom Fin

What it does: AI customer support agent that handles incoming customer queries using your existing help docs, knowledge base, and previous conversation history. Responds in natural language, escalates to humans when needed.

Best for: SaaS companies, e-commerce businesses, and any company with a high volume of repetitive support queries.

UK pricing: Fin charges per resolution, roughly £0.80 per successful AI resolution. No per-seat cost for the AI component, but you need an Intercom plan (starting around £60/month).

Pros:

  • Resolution quality is impressive. Customers often do not realise they are talking to AI
  • Pay-per-resolution model means you only pay when it actually helps
  • Learns from your existing content, so setup is relatively fast
  • Smooth handoff to human agents when it cannot help

Cons:

  • You need good documentation and a solid knowledge base for it to work well
  • The underlying Intercom platform is not cheap
  • Can struggle with complex, multi-part queries
  • Tone can feel slightly off for very formal industries (finance, legal)

Verdict: The best AI customer support tool we have tested. The per-resolution pricing makes it easy to justify. But you need to invest time in your knowledge base first. The AI is only as good as the content you give it. For more on AI agents in business, we have a dedicated guide.

12. Tidio

What it does: Chatbot and live chat platform aimed at small businesses and e-commerce. Combines AI-powered chatbots with human handoff and a shared inbox.

Best for: Small businesses and online shops that need basic customer support automation without enterprise complexity or pricing.

UK pricing: Free plan available. Starter plan is around £24/month. Growth plan is roughly £48/month. The AI chatbot (Lyro) has usage-based pricing starting at about £32/month for 50 conversations.

Pros:

  • Much simpler to set up than Intercom. You can have it running in an afternoon
  • The visual chatbot builder is intuitive, even for non-technical users
  • Lyro AI handles common questions well for the price
  • Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress integrations work smoothly

Cons:

  • AI quality is noticeably below Intercom Fin
  • Conversation limits on the AI mean costs can creep up with volume
  • Reporting is basic
  • Not suitable for complex support workflows

Verdict: A sensible choice for small businesses and online shops that want AI support without the Intercom price tag. It does 70% of what the enterprise tools do at 30% of the cost, which is exactly the right trade-off for a smaller operation.

Automation tools

13. Zapier with AI

What it does: Connects your business apps and automates workflows between them. The AI features include natural language automation building, AI-powered data formatting, and built-in AI actions within workflows.

Best for: Any business that wastes time on repetitive, manual tasks between different apps. Particularly useful for operations, marketing, and sales teams.

UK pricing: Free plan includes 100 tasks/month. Starter is around £16/month. Professional is roughly £40/month. Team plan is about £54/month.

Pros:

  • Over 7,000 integrations means it connects almost everything
  • AI builder lets you describe what you want in plain English and it creates the workflow
  • Tables feature turns Zapier into a lightweight database
  • Reliable. Once a Zap works, it keeps working

Cons:

  • Costs escalate quickly with high-volume workflows
  • Complex automations with multiple branches can be fiddly to debug
  • The AI builder still struggles with anything beyond simple two-step workflows
  • Some integrations are limited compared to native connections

Verdict: Essential for most small and medium businesses. Start with one or two automations that save you the most time. A common first Zap is automatically adding new leads from web forms into your CRM. The AI agents guide explains how automation fits into a broader AI strategy.

14. Make (formerly Integromat)

What it does: Visual automation platform similar to Zapier but with more power for complex, branching workflows. Think of it as the advanced option.

Best for: Businesses that have outgrown simple Zapier automations or need more control over data transformation, error handling, and complex logic.

UK pricing: Free plan includes 1,000 operations/month. Core plan is around £7.50/month. Pro plan is roughly £13/month. Teams start at about £23/month.

Pros:

  • Visual workflow builder is more intuitive than Zapier for complex automations
  • Significantly cheaper than Zapier for high-volume workflows
  • Better error handling and data transformation capabilities
  • HTTP/webhook module lets you connect to almost anything, even without a native integration

Cons:

  • Steeper learning curve than Zapier
  • Fewer native integrations (though the HTTP module compensates)
  • Documentation could be better
  • Less AI built in compared to Zapier’s recent additions

Verdict: The better choice if you need complex automations or run high-volume workflows. The pricing is significantly more generous than Zapier. But if you just need simple automations and prefer ease of use, stick with Zapier. Some of our course participants use both: Zapier for simple workflows, Make for anything involving more than three steps.

Specialist

15. Perplexity

What it does: AI-powered research tool that searches the web, reads sources, synthesises information, and provides cited answers. It is like Google search meets ChatGPT, with sources you can verify.

Best for: Anyone who spends significant time researching: consultants, strategists, analysts, and business development teams. Also useful for competitive intelligence and market research.

UK pricing: Free tier is generous for basic research. Pro plan is around £16/month with higher usage limits and access to more powerful models.

Pros:

  • Citations on everything, so you can verify claims. Critical for professional work
  • Spaces feature lets you create focused research projects with persistent context
  • Handles multi-step research queries much better than a standard search engine
  • Pro Search mode digs deeper and asks clarifying questions

Cons:

  • Sources are not always the most authoritative. Sometimes pulls from forums and blogs over primary sources
  • Cannot replace deep, domain-specific research for complex topics
  • UK-specific results can be patchy for niche queries
  • No offline access

Verdict: The best AI research tool available right now. It has fundamentally changed how we do competitive research and market analysis at Point Academy. The citation feature alone makes it more trustworthy than ChatGPT for research tasks. Worth the Pro subscription if research is a regular part of your work.

How to choose the best AI tools for your business

You do not need all 15 of these. Most businesses should start with two or three:

  1. Pick one general-purpose AI assistant. ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever matches your existing software (Copilot for Microsoft, Gemini for Google).
  2. Add one tool that solves your biggest time sink. Meeting transcription if you are always in calls, automation if you are drowning in manual processes, a BI tool if you cannot get insights from your data.
  3. Start small and expand. Pilot with a few users, measure the impact, then scale.

The tools themselves are only part of the equation. Your team needs to know how to use them effectively, write good prompts, and understand the limitations. That is where proper training makes the difference, and it is exactly what we cover in our AI at Work course and AI for Administrators course.

Frequently asked questions

Are these tools GDPR compliant? Most enterprise plans from major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google) include GDPR-compliant data processing agreements. But you need to check the specific plan. Free tiers and personal plans often have weaker data protections. Always review the data processing terms before rolling out any AI tool across your business.

Can AI tools replace employees? In our experience, no. They make existing staff faster and more capable, but they need human oversight, judgement, and domain expertise to be useful. The businesses getting the best results are the ones that treat AI as a tool for their team, not a replacement.

How much should a UK business budget for AI tools? For a small business (under 20 people), budget around £50-150/month total for AI tools. A mid-sized company should expect £20-50 per user per month for the tools that matter. The key is being selective rather than subscribing to everything.

Which AI tool is best for small businesses? ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro paired with Zapier covers an enormous amount of ground for under £40/month. Add Otter.ai if meetings are a big part of your week. Read our full small business AI guide for specific recommendations.