5 AI tools beyond ChatGPT that actually change how you work

Everyone's talking about ChatGPT, but while you're stuck in the same old conversations, there are AI tools quietly revolutionizing how teams actually work. These aren't just ChatGPT alternatives—they're purpose-built solutions that solve specific workflow problems better than general-purpose AI ever could.

Let's explore five AI tools that can genuinely change how you approach your daily work, not just give you another chatbot to talk to.

What makes Notion AI different from ChatGPT?

Meet the new Notion AI — a helpful assistant right inside your workspace. Notion AI can help you discover answers, bring information together, and automate tedious tasks—all without leaving your existing documents and databases.

The key difference? Context. While ChatGPT starts fresh every conversation, Notion AI lives in the same place as your project plans, tasks, and everything else you store in Notion, and can even search information in your connected apps. Your Notion Agent can use context from your workspace and connected apps to create and edit pages and databases.

Here's how to get started with Notion AI:

Enable Notion AI in your workspace settings (Business and Enterprise plans get full access)
Press space on any new line to get started with Notion AI
Highlight text and select "Ask AI" or type "/AI" to get AI suggestions

The real power comes from its workspace awareness. It can even generate content for you based on context from your workspace — just @-mention a specific page or person in your query.

How does FigJam AI streamline visual collaboration?

FigJam AI helps you instantly visualize ideas, suggest best practices, and automate tedious tasks. But what makes this special is how it solves the "blank canvas problem" that kills productivity in brainstorming sessions.

FigJam AI transforms how teams collaborate:

Generate templates for weekly team syncs, brainstorms, and retros—or, dive into planning with visual timelines and org charts—all from a simple prompt. Built on best practices and inspired by common use cases, these click-and-go prompts are designed to help teams build great products.

The workflow is beautifully simple:

Open FigJam and click the "Generate" star icon
Choose from templates like "Team retrospective" or "Weekly sync plan"
Quickly sort stickies into groupings, so you can spend less time manually organizing and more time uncovering big ideas. Get clarity on the key takeaways and next steps by summarizing stickies with a click

FigJam AI tools are available on paid plans. Requires a Full, Dev, or Collab seat to use AI tools in FigJam, but the time savings are immediate for any team doing visual collaboration.

Why is Whisper the best transcription tool you're not using?

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. The use of such a large and diverse dataset leads to improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language.

Most people only know Whisper through the ChatGPT app, but the OpenAI Whisper API gives you direct access to transcription that's often more accurate than expensive enterprise solutions.

Here's how to use it effectively:

The transcriptions API takes as input the audio file you want to transcribe and the desired output file format for the transcription of the audio. All models support the same set of input formats.

For best results:

Use a simple prompt that includes punctuation: "Hello, welcome to my lecture."
If you want to keep filler words in your transcript, use a prompt that contains them: "Umm, let me think like, hmm... Okay, here's what I'm, like, thinking."
The turbo model is an optimized version of large-v3 that offers faster transcription speed with a minimal degradation in accuracy

The pricing is remarkably affordable compared to enterprise transcription services, making this accessible for individuals and small teams.

What makes Claude Projects superior for team collaboration?

While ChatGPT resets every conversation, Claude Projects creates persistent workspaces that maintain context across multiple sessions and team members.

Each project includes a 200K context window, the equivalent of a 500-page book, so users can add all of the relevant documents, code, and insights to enhance Claude's effectiveness.

The collaboration features are what set it apart:

Projects allow you to create self-contained workspaces with their own chat histories and knowledge bases. Within each project, you can upload documents, provide context, and have focused chats with Claude.

For teams, the sharing system includes granular permissions:

Can use: Members can see project contents, knowledge, and instructions, and chat within the project, but cannot edit it
Can edit: Members can modify project instructions and knowledge, add/remove members, update member settings, and actively contribute to the project

Projects are available to all users, including those with free Claude accounts. Free users can create a maximum of five projects, making this accessible even without a paid plan.

How does DeepL outperform Google Translate for professional work?

DeepL's newest technology raises the bar for teams looking for high-quality translation and content optimization at scale—and is proven to increase accuracy and reduce mistranslations.

The DeepL API offers features that Google Translate simply can't match:

The context parameter makes it possible to include additional context that can influence a translation but is not translated itself. This additional context can potentially improve translation quality when translating short, low-context source texts such as product names on an e-commerce website, article headlines on a news website, or UI elements.

Professional features include:

Handle brand terms and technical jargon with ease. Customize translations at scale with glossaries
Translate entire Word, PowerPoint, PDF, text, and HTML files
Be sure your translations say it the right way with formal/informal tone of voice awareness

Getting started is straightforward:

Sign up at deepl.com/pro-api
DeepL API Free allows developers to translate up to 500,000 characters per month for free
Use their client libraries for Python, JavaScript, or other languages

What should you try first?

Start with the tool that solves your biggest current pain point. If you're drowning in meeting transcripts, begin with Whisper. If your team struggles with brainstorming sessions that go nowhere, try FigJam AI. For document-heavy collaboration, Claude Projects could be the game-changer.

The real power comes from combining these tools. Use Whisper to transcribe your meetings, then feed those transcripts into a Claude Project for analysis, while using Notion AI to turn insights into actionable tasks. This creates an AI-powered workflow that's far more powerful than any single tool alone.

These tools represent a shift from AI as a novelty to AI as a genuine productivity multiplier. While everyone else is having conversations with ChatGPT, you could be building systems that actually change how work gets done.