2025 is here and if you want to take your career and your life to the next level you have to be using AI tools. In the past year, I've gone through hundreds of AI tools myself, tried them out, and came up with a list of tools which have completely changed the way I do my work. In this article, I'll share ten comprehensive tools, how I use them in my particular workflow, and why you should consider integrating them into your content creation process.
***1. Heygen: Your Personal AI Video Avatar
***First up is Heygen. I have personally used Heygen to create my own custom AI Avatar and the results are incredible. Think about those video reels you see online; some of them might not even be recorded by a person sitting in front of the camera like I'm doing right now. Many could be created completely with the help of Heygen.
***How it Works
***The way it works is that you record a 5-minute video of yourself talking to the camera, doing your usual hand movements, having your expressions, and then putting that video into Heygen. In just about an hour or less than that, your AI Avatar is good to go. Getting started is completely free. I do have a paid plan which I'm paying Heygen for, but this initial setup is accessible.
***Why Use It for Content Creation?
***This is an incredible tool because it saves my time immensely. And guess what? I'm actually selling this as a service to Founders in the US. We tell them that hey, the most important thing for you is your time, and we as an agency are going to give you back your time. How? We will make an AI Avatar for you and we will create videos and content on your behalf so that you can do what matters the most to you, which is building your own company. And it sells like crazy! Everyone wants to get a bite of that. That is an insane opportunity. But beyond business, for any content creator, this tool is incredible. The type of videos it creates feels so natural, and often you cannot tell the difference.
***2. ElevenLabs: Crafting Your AI Voice
***Heygen is powerful, but it's often incomplete without the next tool I'm going to talk about, and that is ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs is an insane AI tool if you want to create audio for yourself or you want to use another AI audio.
***How it Works
***The way it works is that you upload 1 to two hours of your audio of you speaking, and it then creates your own AI voice Avatar. So you do not have to record your voice again; you've built, you've trained this model now, and it will automatically generate your own voice. The differences are very minimal, especially with enough training data.
***Why Use It for Content Creation?
***The problem, or rather the key to quality, with this is it only gets better with more audio that you feed in. Ideally, the best AI Avatar videos that you've seen on the internet by creators, they fed at least 10 hours of audio into that model to train it so that it feels very natural. I have used ElevenLabs in collaboration with Heygen to create my AI video reels that you might have seen on my Instagram. Combining a realistic AI avatar with a perfectly cloned voice allows you to scale your content production significantly without being physically present for every recording.
***3. Suno AI: Custom, Copyright-Free Music
***Let's move on to the audio side of things, specifically music. Suno AI is an incredible tool if you want to create background audio, if you want to create music which is your own custom music. This means there is no problem with copyright issues. There is no singer or artist which is going to come after your life taking all of your AdSense revenue. For a creator like me, this is really helpful. I have used Epidemic Music in the past, but Suno AI is an amazing tool which helps me generate my own custom background music along with those soundtracks that I can then use in my video itself.
***Solving the Copyright Headache
***I think the biggest problem for creators who are creating Vlogs and content in general is copyright issues. I remember the first video I made on my channel; it was a summary of my first month in college. That entire video had various different songs playing throughout it, and I had no clue about IP, about content rights, about music in general. It instantly got demonetized the minute I made it live. That is why tools like Suno AI are a godsend for people who want to create genuine content and make a living out of it as well. There are also other tools like Soundraw which basically take a look at the vibe of your video and create a custom background audio track for it. Check out Suno AI; it’s a game-changer for video soundtracks.
***4. NotebookLM: Your AI Learning Assistant
***The fourth one is called NotebookLM, an insane tool by Google which I've been using recently to get summaries of anything which I am not able to read at the moment. Sometimes for me, whenever I'm traveling, could be in a car, could be in a flight, could be public transport, I'm not looking at my phone 'cause whenever I do that I get a headache sometimes.
***Unique Consumption Method
***So what I do as an option is that I feed that blog into NotebookLM. It gets me an audio podcast in which two people are talking about that particular blog or that particular video and summarizing it for me, so that I get a clear picture of what this person is trying to say without having to read it on the go. That's a huge time-saver for me. I get to summarize so many incredible blogs by Paul Graham, by Sam Altman, by Gary Tan, by Mark Andreessen, by all of these people that I look up to using NotebookLM.
***Beyond Summaries
***I also use it to summarize and get my doubts cleared for particular documents that I have. For example, if I have like a PDF of a book, if I have a PDF of something that a company has sent me, I can quickly feed that PDF on NotebookLM. It gives me a clear representation of that book, and I can ask any questions about it. It gives me the highlights of the book, of any PDF that I'm feeding. I get a very deeper insight into what that book or what that PDF is all about. It’s completely free for you to check out. You can feed in blogs, you can feed in any documents that you might have, you know, doc, PPT, anything works. You can also feed in like a proper YouTube video and it will summarize it for you. It's an amazing tool which you should definitely use if you haven't tried it out yet. For content research and understanding complex topics quickly, it's invaluable.
***5. Claude: Advanced AI for Complex Tasks
***The fifth tool is called Claude, built by Anthropic. I recently saw Dario, who's the founder, talk about his vision for Anthropic and Claude in general. The most important use case for Claude right now, especially the latest models like Claude 3.5 Sonet, is for coding as well as for computer use.
***Coding and Computer Use
***They have this new functionality called computer use in which you can actually ask it to do stuff and it will do it on a computer sandbox environment that it has created for you. It works amazingly well. It's also great for coding. The 3.5 Sonet model is amazing at coming up with components, with little code snippets that you can use, or even creating a whole program. They've made literal games just using the coding abilities of Claude 3.5 Sonet. It's pretty crazy what you can do with it with just typing natural language.
***Content Creation Angle
***While its strength lies in coding and complex reasoning, this capability can be harnessed for content creation too. Imagine generating interactive elements for your website, creating data visualizations automatically, or even drafting complex technical explanations. You don't even need to know how to code; you should just be able to describe what you want, and it will build it for you right in front of your eyes. What a time to be alive! Using these tools blows my mind how easy everything has gotten.
***6. Flux AI: Ultra-Realistic Image Generation
***Moving into the visual realm, the next tool is for creating ultra-realistic pictures of you doing anything, wearing anything, using Flux AI. Flux AI recently got viral on Twitter, and it basically is like an API that you can use to generate ultra-realistic pictures of yourself, and people will not be able to tell the difference.
***Pushing Visual Boundaries
***There are so many people who are creating these images of girls, images of certain people doing certain things, and seeing that this is AI generated, and you cannot tell the difference. It looks so ultra-realistic. It's amazing for generating thumbnails, it's amazing for creating those social media banners, for creating these LinkedIn posts, for whatever you might want. It works really, really well.
***Compared to Others
***Midjourney does a good job, but Flux AI is on another level right now when it comes to hyperrealism. If you need stunning, unique visuals for your blog posts, social media, or marketing materials that look completely real, check it out if you have not already.
***7. Perplexity AI: The Future of Research
***Next up is my favorite tool whenever I'm doing AI search, and that is Perplexity. The way it basically works is you would go on the platform and you can search up anything, and it gives you real-time results, and it is much better than Google for certain queries.
***Why Switch from Google?
***If you've been Googling anything before to get the latest information about something, stop Googling and just go to Perplexity and just start searching over there. You get real, live information, sourced and cited, which is crucial for content creation research. It helps you quickly gather accurate information, understand different perspectives on a topic, and find supporting data for your content.
***The Vision Behind It
***The founder, Aravind Srinivas, whom I got to meet in San Francisco and shoot a podcast with, is one of the most driven people in the field of AI tools and chatbots. They are doing some phenomenal work out there. For staying updated and doing deep research efficiently, Perplexity is a must-use tool.
***8. OpenAI Sora: Revolutionizing Video Creation
***This one is a potential game-changer: OpenAI Sora. It's finally out in public access to some extent, and I think this is the most revolutionary tool for video editors out there. We've all seen the amazing work that OpenAI Sora can do, generating video clips from text prompts.
***Beyond Simple Clips: Storyboarding
***More importantly is the storyboarding feature. We all know that Sora is great for creating certain frames, but you couldn't easily make a whole storyline with it initially. That's where the storyboarding feature comes in, in which you can describe particular frames and it will stitch together the whole scene for you. That I think is incredible because now video editors, for the first time, will have an option to go in and create entire scenes without doing it themselves, without going to Pexels or Unsplash and other places, and create ultra-realistic video elements.
***Current Limitations and Potential
***It struggles a little bit with limbs whenever something is walking, so it just looks a bit weird sometimes, but for the most part, it looks incredibly real. There are so many things that you can do today with Sora which you would have had to do yourself manually, animating manually, and it would take you hours and hours. It could today be done in minutes with the help of Sora. Check out OpenAI Sora if you have not already. It represents a massive leap for video content creation.
***9. Napkin AI: From Text to Visuals Instantly
***Another tool focused on visuals, but from a different angle, is Napkin AI. For me particularly, it is very good because with it, I'm able to turn any text into visuals. These are visuals which would otherwise take me hours and hours to make on PowerPoint or using the tools on video editing software.
***Speeding Up Visual Content
***I can do that in seconds with Napkin AI. If you're a creator, especially one who needs to explain concepts visually or create engaging presentations or social media graphics quickly, this tool can be a lifesaver. Transforming your written ideas or key points into compelling visuals almost instantly streamlines a traditionally time-consuming part of content creation.
***10. Google Mariner: Automating Your Workflow with AI Agents
***Lastly, let's talk about the future, which is already starting to arrive: AI agents. Google Mariner is a prime example. I was recently in a press briefing by Google and they unveiled Google Mariner, which is basically their AI agentic workflow.
***How AI Agents Work
***The way it works is that you go on Chrome and you basically open Google Mariner, and you can just type anything like, "Hey, find me the cheapest flight from San Francisco to Bangalore," or "Check the emails of these few people," and press enter. It will automatically do all those tasks for you without you having to go and do it manually yourself. And it works really, really well.
***The Bigger Picture: Agentic Future
***That is an insane tool that you can use to automate your tasks and get more things done faster. This ties into Sam Altman's idea that it is now today possible for a single person company to make a billion dollars in revenue, all with the help of AI agents, with a crazy margin. It's not just Google; OpenAI has its "Swarm" initiative, Salesforce has Agent Force. 2025 is going to be all about AI agents. Imagine using an agent to research content ideas, find contact information for outreach, schedule social media posts, or even draft initial content outlines based on your instructions, all automatically right in your browser. Google Mariner gives us a glimpse into how AI can handle the routine tasks, freeing up creators to focus on the creative aspects.
These were essentially ten tools which have significantly impacted content creation workflows, either my own or showing immense potential. Go try them out yourself and see which ones fit best into your process. The world of AI tools is evolving rapidly, and leveraging them effectively can truly take your content to the next level in 2025 and beyond. Start using AI tools if you haven't already!
