S2. Ep3 - Top 5 AI and Automation Tools For Small Businesses In 2026
Overwhelmed by AI tools? You're not alone. In this episode, we're cutting through the noise to bring you Noel's top 5 AI tools for small business owners in 2026 - tools we actually use every single day.
Discover why Claude beats ChatGPT for business writing, how Google AI Studio lets you build custom apps for free, and why Make.com offers 10x better value than Zapier. We break down what each tool does, how you can use it, and what it costs (including generous free plans).
Perfect for service-based business owners, solopreneurs, and small teams who want sustainable AI solutions that actually move your business forward - not just trendy tools that gather dust.
Links to our Top 5:
Episodes mentioned:
S1. Ep34 - How to Choose Between Zapier, N8N and Make.com for Your Business
S1. Ep36 - OpenAI's Atlas Browser + Claude Skills: What You Need to Know
How to find us:
Join our membership over on Skool, where we support you on your AI and automation journey. We share exclusive content in the membership that shows you the automations we talks about in action how to build them. Find out more about the AI Business Club here.
We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all.
New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us.
If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai
-
Katie (00:26)
Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie. And as always, I've got Noel here with me. Hey, Noel. How you doing?
Noel (00:33)
Hello. Absolutely fabulous this week. Yeah!
Katie (00:38)
Absolutely fabulous.
So this week we are talking all about getting started with AI automations and the tools that you might want to use, but what we have created are five of what we believe are the best tools to get started for AI automations for your business. So Noel's got a list. He's going to walk us through each one step by step, aren't you Noel?
Noel (01:17)
Absolutely, yeah.
Katie (01:18)
And we are going to explain a little bit about what they do, how you could use them. And we'll also talk about price points or if there's free plans and things like that. Cause I think that's also really important when you are deciding on what tools to use, cost and return of investment is very important as business owners. So we'll go through all of that as well. So I feel like we should just jump straight into it if I'm honest.
Noel (01:59)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've got my top five ready and raring to go.
Katie (02:03)
Okay, and was there reason why you chose these five? Like, is there a particular theme or reasoning behind it? I feel like that would be quite interesting.
Noel (02:15)
So yeah, so these are the tools that I use most often. So I've been using AI for over three years. So I've used pretty much every platform there is available, you know, giving it a go, see what it's like. And these are the ones that I kind of stick with and I would use on a daily basis. And they're also really beginner friendly as well. You know, anybody can create an account. Most of these have free plans as well, which is really cool. And you know, can just get started straight away and test these things out. So yeah, it's been hard to narrow it down to five, but we've got there at the end.
Katie (02:59)
Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do, isn't it? Like it's 2026, AI is not going anywhere. It's actually now being introduced into school curriculums as of, I think it was next, I think it's next year, so 2027. So AI is not going anywhere. And what we are all about, isn't it Noel, is really helping business owners use AI and AI automations in a really efficient way and not just kind of jumping on trends or those viral posts that you see that, yeah, what they're saying is interesting and helpful, but actually it's not sustainable or it's not long-term help. And that's what we're all about. And that's like why actually we started our membership AI Business Club over on the Skool platform because we want you to feel confident in using AI and automations within your business and not have to rely on PDF downloads. We've all seen them. We want you to be able to go, do you know what? I could figure that out myself or I could implement that myself or I know exactly what I need to do and maybe I need to get help, but you're not going to be overcharged or anything like that. And I think that's what's really important to us, isn't it?
Noel (04:29)
Yeah, definitely is. Yeah, there's so many applications out there all have their own subscription costs. So, yeah, it can get quite expensive quite quickly if you go crazy on your subscriptions and then half of them you'll probably use once and then never again. So yeah, hopefully this list to help you narrow down on some of those applications.
Katie (04:56)
Okay, so let's get into it and do you want to tell us what your first one is?
Noel (05:04)
So my first one is Claude. So I've talked about Claude quite a lot on this podcast in the past and it is my number one daily driver large language model that I use every day. It doesn't matter how big or small my question is, it always goes into Claude. And yeah, I guess the reason I've put it in instead of ChatGPT is I think OpenAI and ChatGPT are trying to be the Swiss army knife of AI. And it's kind of the thing that gets everybody into AI because there's like 700 million users a week, you know, so there's a fair few people use it. But where you kind of get to a point after a while that you just think it isn't really for me. And I think for business use cases, Claude is probably far better. And yeah, mainly because of its writing content, like the way it writes its responses and, you know, will create newsletters, blog posts, emails, anything of that, you know, it absolutely nails it every single time, which is exactly what you want.
Katie (06:16)
Yeah, of course it is. Yeah, because we were having this conversation earlier, weren't we? We were talking about like, although ChatGPT is what gets everyone into AI and gets used to people using it and asking questions and prompt engineering. But actually I've noticed in the last few weeks that when I've been talking to it, it kind of loses its memory or it gets diluted. So I could be asking it things and then like on the same chat, like, you know, I don't know, asking another question, it dilutes or it kind of forgets like the conversation that we've just had. And I'm finding that more and more recently, like almost every time I'm having a conversation with it. And yeah, it makes me feel quite frustrated because I'm like, no, I already said don't do that or like, you're not listening to me. So it's, yeah, it's becoming quite a challenge. So I can see why you picked Claude over ChatGPT. But what about things like the custom GPTs that people can make for themselves? What would be a good alternative for that. Is there something that we can do within Claude?
Noel (07:46)
Yes. So they recently in the last few months released skills and this is a way of like creating instructions, which the AI will follow every time you ask it to use a skill or it can even infer that you should use that skill based on the conversation. So it might be, so I've got a brand guidelines skill set up. So every time I ask it to create content, it knows, hold on a minute. I need to use his brand voice. So it goes off, looks at that skill, understands my writing styles and isms and all that sort of stuff that's in that document and then creates the content based on that. So it's very similar to custom GPTs because it's just instructions and then you're, you know, asking the AI with those additional instructions. So it's kind of the same thing, but the best thing about it over custom GPT users, could have, you know, you could be in any conversation at any point and then, you know, trigger one of those skills. Whereas a custom GPT, you've got to open up a separate chat session and just talk to that GPT in its own little bubble. And that's kind of it. So yeah, a skill you can use anywhere at any time, which is brilliant. So you might not have even thought about writing anything or need anything with your brand voice, but you know, it could be like 10 minutes, 20 minutes late, you know, actually a LinkedIn post would be really cool for that. So you go, yeah, I'll grab that skill and then put it in. But yeah, there's also what you don't get with custom GPTs is kind of like a template or a way to kind of quickly get started and build one. So with Claude skills, there's actually a skill generation skill. So you can call that and then say, well, you know, use that one and then create me a skill that does X, Y and Z. This is what I need. Need it to do. And it will go off and create it and you just add it into your account. Is straightforward as that. So, anyone can create them. Really, really straightforward. But yeah, they're really powerful.
Katie (09:58)
I know we've talked about Claude skills previously on our podcast, but for anyone who's listening for the first time, like what can you create as a Claude skill? Can you just give us a couple of really quick examples?
Noel (10:13)
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of anything where you need to do stuff repetitively. So, you know, you could be creating newsletters. So you'd be like, well, every newsletter I do is in this specific format. So you would give it that format and then off it will go and do it the same way every single time. You can get it, the world's your oyster really when it comes to this sort of stuff. But yeah, there's all kinds of things you can do. So we would just look at what you normally ask repetitively, and then think, could I put that in a skill? If yes, do it. And then, you know, you'll always have that consistent output. Cause one thing I find, especially with ChatGPT is, you know, you'll ask it to do one thing and then the week after you then have to start that conversation again, you know, and then rehash it and then finally get what you need. Whereas, with the skills that's removed, thankfully.
Katie (11:14)
Yeah, I think now in this current time of filming, which is January 2026, that ChatGPT is now like quite a basic business tool and Claude is what business owners are using to stay ahead and to get ahead.
Noel (11:27)
Yes, definitely. Yeah. A lot of the AI slop that you might see on social media and people flagging it, that's probably come from ChatGPT.
Katie (11:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, moving on to the second one, Noel, what have you got for us?
Noel (11:53)
So the second one is Notebook LM by Google. And the reason I put that in is because as businesses, you may want to research things or learn new skills or anything like that. So what Notebook LM allows you to do is just have a chat with the AI and say, well, look, this is what I want you to go off and research. And it'll go off, gather loads and loads of sources online. And you can then chat with those sources so you can have a conversation with it, you know, find out new things or whatever. And then you can then go off and create content. So it could be documents, could be slides. You can do audio files, videos. There's all kinds of different things that you can then do with all of that data, which is really awesome. So if you need to go off and research anything, then Notebook LM is like the real go-to, you know, that's really, really thorough.
Katie (12:51)
And how would that differ from Claude?
Noel (12:56)
So although yes, Claude can do research, can do Google searches and stuff like that. What you can do in Notebook LM is add in your own sources as well. So you could say to it, so Claude released Cowork the other week. So you could say, do all the research on this new tool and then give me all the insights, how they built it, and it will go off and do it. But then you might then spot like a YouTube video talking about it. So you could copy the link from that YouTube video and then put it into your sources. And then it would then go off, you know, read through the transcripts and things like that. So, you know, it's really awesome how that sort of works. So yeah, it gives you that ability to, you know, edit those sources and it makes it really clear as to which ones it's done as well, which is really, really handy. So yeah, if you think anything's missing, you think, you know, you can add that in manually after. Pretty awesome. But yeah, one of the other big features as well is kind of like the audio files that you can do. So that's, you know, you could ask it to do research on a question and then you can just go on the audio overview and then listen to an AI generated podcast where they back and forth talk about the particular topic that you've been researching, which is kind of interesting to hear like a two way conversation about something that you're trying to maybe you're trying to learn something that's like, yeah, that's, you know, could be really, really helpful for some people.
Katie (14:28)
Yeah, I quite like that because I think my does like that. Like if I'm watching a video, you know, then having a conversation about it, obviously you get that deeper learning, don't you? So I feel like actually that would be really useful.
Noel (14:44)
Yeah. And if you need deeper learning, you could also add in the quizzes as well. So it's got a little quizzes button. So yeah, if you want, if you're learning it, it'll go off and then create those questions so you can go through them as well as like the flashcards asset. Yeah. So you can create those as well. So if you're doing a talk and things out based on that research, yeah. Really awesome. Yeah.
Katie (15:06)
Brilliant. Will it give you a gold star if you get all of the questions correct? That's what I want to know.
Noel (15:21)
I've never got them all right. I would never know. Let's say yes.
Katie (15:23)
Okay. Okay. Brilliant. And I should say, as we're talking about these tools or software, we will put everything that we've mentioned in the show notes below for you so you can go and check them out yourself. Okay, so two done, three to go. So what is the third one?
Noel (15:46)
So number three is Make.com. And yeah, this is one of my favourite tools. I use this all the time. And yeah, it's the main platform for building automations and integrating different software and platforms together. So you might have like a CRM, Google Sheets or Excel, you know, Calendly, Slack, whatever you use. You can integrate it all together and then automate those processes. And the way it works is by like a building block kind of methodology. So where you just kind of drag and drop them onto the screen and then link them up together. So it's really easy to visualise the flows and the automations as well, which is really cool. The big thing for me as well is the addition of AI directly into Make.com. So they've got loads and loads of really cool apps in there. So you've got their own kind of like AI assistant, which is like a large language model, which you can ask questions to, you can use for content generation, whatever you wish. But you've also got things like AI text processing. So that can take a big old document, make it really small, or take a very small document and make it really big. So you could expand it and all that kind of thing. And it can also, so they're doing some really, really cool translation stuff. So you can take a document from another language, translate it into English, process it in some sort of way, and then translate it back to its original language and then send it to its end user. So some really cool stuff you can do with it. And then they've got also added features. So you've got OCR, which is basically image to text, and then you've got speech to text and vice versa. So, yeah, you've kind of got this really cool tool kit where you can string all this together and make some really, really cool automations, which is really awesome. And then you've also got, I say, like the AI assistants. So this is your brand new Agents feature, which has been released in the last few weeks, which I'm a massive fan of. And what this allows you to do is take those automations and then feed it into the assistant. And then the assistant will know when to use that particular automation depending on what it's doing. So if I'm doing, if I'm researching a topic, then I'm gonna use this research automation. And if I'm like, creating, like doing a Google search, then we use that automation. So there's loads of different ways you can get them to handle those additional pieces of information for you. So yeah, it's really awesome.
Katie (18:36)
Yeah. And I know you are like such a strong advocate for Make.com. Like you do everything within it. Don't you? Like, I think your entire business is run on Make.com.
Noel (18:47)
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So wherever you can add it, I've pretty much got it in there. So yeah, it might be emails. It might be invoice processing. It might be spreadsheets. Yeah, there's all kinds of different automations I've got running, which is really cool. And yeah, they save me hours. But also as well, I use it a lot for my clients as well. So they, you know, have all the similar ones running as well. So yeah, it's become my, it's become a staple. And it's probably my number one tool as a business owner now. So yeah, really, really important to me.
Katie (19:22)
Yeah, I can tell. Okay, so what is the fourth tool?
Noel (19:30)
So number four is actually a membership platform. So this one is Skool. And I've put this in as quite a few people have asked me what I use. Cause we mentioned it a few times on the podcast that we have our community on Skool. This is where we put all of our content, all of our knowledge base, all the guides and everything. People can come and ask us questions, get support.
Katie (19:52)
Yeah, yeah.
Noel (19:56)
Yeah, it's all in there. We've also got live events in there. We've got calendars. We've got all kinds of different things set up in there and it's just that really nice one area where people can go to. So it makes it really straightforward and people can learn and, you know, follow those guides and they know it's updated and that's what we're actively talking about. So you've got it all in one space, which is great. And then like I say, there's like a calendar, so we do drop-in sessions. So we might go through a specific topic or something or, you know, we just leave it open and then people can drop in and ask us whatever they want.
Katie (20:28)
I think the main ethos as well behind the community is we want the community of like-minded business owners who, like us who know that AI and AI automations is the future of business. They're not going anywhere and we want people to feel comfortable in asking questions or sharing wins.
Noel (20:52)
Yeah.
Katie (20:53)
And I think that's what Skool does as well because you get a gamification as well so people are awarded for being active and for joining in. And yeah, it's really nice to be able to celebrate each other as well.
Noel (21:11)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And it's like a community of people wanting to, you know, just learn and that the kind of people who are generally in there are ones that are probably a bit more tech savvy than most. And yeah, just want to kind of get ahead and see how things are going. And yeah, they're eager to learn, which is brilliant.
Katie (21:33)
Yeah. And we, we do talk about Make.com a lot inside of our membership AI Business Club. If anyone wants any further help with using Make, setting up your first automations, we've got a step-by-step process on actually how to do that.
Noel (21:47)
Yep. And there's even some build guides as well. So if you've never built anything, there are some step-by-steps just to get you up and running. You know, it's always good to have something working at the end of the day.
Katie (21:56)
Yeah, yeah. And if you get stuck or anything, Noel's on hand as well to ask you, ask questions, get support, get help, point you in the right direction, help you fix things.
Noel (22:05)
Yep. Yeah, I may know a thing or two about Make.
Katie (22:14)
Okay Noel, so what is the last tool that you have put on your top five?
Noel (22:22)
So this last tool is, it may be a touch advanced, but anybody can use it. It's nothing to be scared of. It's Google AI Studio. And what we can do within there is to build applications, whether that be mobile or web. And we can build it for any use case. So it could be like an internal tool for you and your team. So it would help you speed up processes or whatever you need to do, or maybe you just want to create like a really cool image generation platform using Nano Banana to your specific style. You could do that as well, you know, that just lives in your account and only you get to use it. That's fine. You don't have to publish it, but you can create any kind of app and you have like full access to the Google ecosystem. So it's not just their AI tools. So you know, so you've got like your VO3 for video, Nano, Banana, you think all the Gemini models, but then you also get access to things like Google Maps. That's all seamlessly integrated. So when you're chatting with the agent to build the application and you say, well, I'd like a Google Maps for this bit, it can then, it already knows the code snippets already. You know it's already been trained on that information. So it could just bring it in straight away. So for a customer I was working with the other week, they were like, it'd be really cool, you know, in our quotation process, if this app, you know, we put in the postcode and then it showed us the nearest five hotels and got prices so we could, you know, put that within our costings. And I was like, yep, sure, we can do that. And then within five minutes it was done.
Katie (24:15)
Not there.
Noel (24:17)
It's just like that would have took hours and hours and hours, you know, trying to find GitHub repositories or Stack Overflow or go through Reddit trying to find how to do that sort of thing as a non-coder. But yeah, you don't have to be a coder at all to be able to use Google AI Studio. It's just really awesome. It's free to use as well, which is great. And they always put in their latest tools as well. So if a new version of Nano Banana comes out, you can test it within that environment and then see what it's like. You know you might really, you might be thinking, well, that's, it's all right, but I won't bother changing a current application. You can do whatever you wish. Yeah.
Katie (25:01)
That sounds really good. Excellent choices. So what I think now would be really helpful if we go through the costings of each software or tool that you have mentioned in your top five. So let's start with the first one. So Claude, so we know that there is a free version.
Noel (25:03)
Yeah. Yeah. There is a free version of Claude and there's also two pay plans. So you've got Pro and Max and they're priced at I believe it's £19 per month and then £90 per month. Yeah, I'm not sure about the dollar rates. I did try and look that up, but as well, why laptops localised to the UK? It was like, no, I'm just going to tell you pounds, but I believe it's like $100 for the big plan. But really, all you're getting as you're going up is earlier access to new tools. So like I say, they released Cowork last week. So that went to the max users first. And I was kind of expecting that to be for at least a month, but it was like four days. And then it came down to the pro plan. Well, yeah, I guess we're paying for that usage. So yeah, we might as well have it. It worked, which is good. So yeah. You also get extended usage. I find that Claude, although it's great, it does restrict you a little bit in terms of your usage. ChatGPT is probably a bit more fluid and lets you have more conversations. But yeah, Claude is a little bit more restricted. So yeah.
Katie (26:36)
Okay. Okay, second one, Notebook LM.
Noel (26:38)
Okay. So yeah, Notebook LM is again free to use. You can just log in with a normal Google account and off you go. There are obviously, of course, there's going to be usage limits with that. So with this one and also the Google AI Studio is kind of interlinked. So they're part of like the Google Gemini ecosystem. So if you upgrade your Gemini account to the pay plan, I think it's like £9 per month. Then that gives you then extra access to Notebook LM so you can have more queries per day, per week or whatever. And it kind of works again with AI Studio so you get extra usage limits. But yeah, they've got a crazy plan, which is I think it's £235 per month, which is their like top tier all singing or dancing plan with loads of usage limits. It's like, I'm sure I'm gonna pay for that.
Katie (27:34)
Why? Yeah, probably better like for larger businesses.
Noel (27:43)
Definitely, yeah, more on the enterprise level, but yeah, to get started, it's free. And then yeah, paid plans pretty cheap to start off.
Katie (27:51)
Okay, great. Is me?
Noel (27:53)
Yeah. And then the other one is Make. Yeah. So with Make, they have a really generous free plan. So you get 1,000 credits to use per month. So if you have like a three step process and you run it, that's going to use three credits. That's kind of how it works. So yeah, if you just want to test it out, you know, you've got plenty of head room to build something really complicated or even really simple, it doesn't really matter, you know, do whatever you wish. So, you know, it gives you plenty to play with. And then the first pay plan comes in at $9 and that then gives you 10,000 operations per month, which is usually plenty for anybody. So, yeah, more than enough to get started with. But compare those 10,000 credits with something like Zapier that would cost you around $89 per month. So yeah, really, really good value for money. And yeah, an excellent app.
Katie (28:52)
Yeah. Yeah. And we've also done a podcast episode on like Make versus Zapier. So again, we'll put that in the show notes below so people can check that out as well.
Noel (29:02)
Absolutely, yeah. It's a good one, that one.
Katie (29:13)
So there we have it. That was Noel's top five AI tools and software to use for your small business in 2026. And if you've got any questions or there's something that you would like us to address or answer on the podcast, we'll leave our email address below. If you just put in the subject heading podcast. We will try our very best to answer it for you, but we've got lots of amazing episodes lined up for you this year. We're really excited about where we're taking the podcast in 2026. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. And if you liked it, we would love if you could leave us a review and we will catch you next time very soon.
