Everything AI: Tools for Finance, Productivity, and Startups

It’s been over a year since the release of ChatGPT dropped a virtual bomb on the world of finance, marketing, sales and, well, everything. We all know what followed, an absolute tidal wave of startups, pivots and new tools from established companies, looking to capitalize on the AI hype train.

But unlike some of the other recent hype cycles we’ve seen (hello, NFT’s), generative AI technology has real world applications and use cases. In fact, there are so many real world use cases that one of the biggest challenges for businesses has been deciding on which ones to implement.

There’s a dizzying array of tools available across practically every segment of a company’s operations, as well as new AI features are popping up on established platforms like Slack, G-Suite and Microsoft Office on a daily basis.

Like a child standing in front of a wall full of candy and struggling to choose which to buy with their allowance, teams are faced with the difficult task of sifting through the thousands of AI-driven software tools out there to find the ones best suited for them.

In this guide, we’ll be whittling down the list to a series of AI tools we believe are worth considering. The list is not exhaustive, and there will probably have been 100 new products launched by the time you’ve read to the end, but it will provide a solid basis for you to start from in finding the tools that are the best fit for your company.

The good news? It’s worth the effort. If, like many, you’re thinking about how to recession proof your business, AI is allowing teams to do more with less at a time when efficiency has become more important than ever. Particularly for small businesses and startups, AI offers access to the capabilities of a far bigger company, without the same overhead.

Understanding AI Tools for Business

The case for AI tools in a business context is clear. It saves time by taking repetitive tasks off your team’s plate. An employee that may have previously had to spend 10 hours a week consolidating financial information from multiple sources into a single spreadsheet, can now use an AI tool to automatically pull the data, organize it and send it to the relevant people.

This can be done in seconds, automatically, with little to no human intervention.

Now that same employee has 10 spare hours a week to spend on more high value tasks. With less time needed to collect the data, that time could instead be used on more high value tasks, such as analyzing the information or creating a strategy based on it.

Or it could simply mean that this department can scale far more effectively as the company grows, allowing a team of 5 to do what would have previously required a team of 10.

This is especially true for SaaS businesses, with so much of the work done in every team, from engineering to finance to marketing and sales, being heavily data driven and technical. By integrating AI tools into the workflow of the company, it provides far more flexibility as the company grows, and offers the potential to improve margins at the same time.

And of course, this integration doesn’t necessarily mean bringing on a whole list of new software providers. Most existing companies are adding AI tools to their platforms, improving on the fundamentals of what they already offer by replacing manual tasks with automation.

This has been our approach at Mosaic, where we’ve overlaid AI capabilities on our extensive treasury and finance functionality. With Mosaic’s Arc AI, finance teams can access their data quicker, build complex reports and create forecasts at the click of a button.

In short, AI tools in the SaaS sector aren’t something that can, or should, be ignored.

11 Best AI Business Tools in 2024

As we’ve mentioned, there’s no shortage of AI tools for businesses to implement into their operations. Here’s our take on the best AI business tools to consider in your business right now, across the various different parts of the company.

Best AI Tools for Finance

1. Mosaic

It wouldn’t be right for us not to include our own AI functionality in this list. Because, it’s impressive. Biased? Yes. True? Also yes.

The Mosaic platform provides finance teams with the ability to combine all of their financial data into a cloud-based single source of truth via your customizable SaaS dashboard. These can be tailored to different segments of your business, with an executive dashboard looking at all of the big picture information, and managers able to see a more detailed breakdown of their business unit. From there, they can create baseline forecasts, complex scenario plans, customized reports and dig into the details on their historical data.

But of course, this all takes time. The data is all there, but it still requires human intervention to find specific details or conduct certain types of ad hoc analysis.

This is the core reason why we built Arc AI.

It gives the finance team the ability to manipulate and interrogate that data like never before. Gross profit down in a specific region last quarter? Instead of having an employee dig into the numbers for two days, you can simply ask Arc to find out for you. It can analyze all the historical data, and pull anomalies or trends that give a reason to the drop in profits.

That moves employees’ time from finding out ‘what happened’ and shifting it to ‘how to fix it.’

Not only that, Arc is an excellent addition to Mosaic’s already robust financial reporting software, and can be used to summarize complex financial data for important areas such as Board reporting, highlighting the biggest current risks in your outstanding accounts payable and automating the outreach process and much, much more.

Mosaic pricing

• Available upon request

Mosaic ratings

• G2: 4.7/5 (144+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (23 reviews)

2. Glean.ai

Another company providing additional functionality and saving time for the finance team, is Glean.ai. The platform specializes in accounts payable, and allows users to dive deeper into the details of their vendors, with the aim to make the payments process easier, as well as making it more efficient to find savings and proactively spot issues.

Glean’s mission is to create a more detailed and analytical workflow for accounts payable, and AI is an integral part of that. One example is the way in which AI is used to pull actionable and valuable insights from invoices, such as how the average bill has increased over time, giving approvers more accessible information to consider before they hit send.

The platform also allows many manual accounts payable tasks to be automated, such as accruals, managing prepaid schedules and splitting bills by line items.

Glean.ai pricing

• Starting from $295 per month with a free trial available.

Glean.ai ratings 

• G2: 4.9/5 (15 reviews)
• Capterra: 5/5 (7 reviews)

Best AI Tools for SaaS Productivity

3. ClickUp

All SaaS companies need a project management tool, and ClickUp is one of the best. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for managing all areas of a business, to ensure that work is being delivered on time, and that company resources are being deployed efficiently.

Now these capabilities have been improved with the integration of AI technology into the platform. As with many of these integrations on our list, the number of features using AI is long, but they essentially all do the same thing. Take small, frequent, manual tasks and automate them.

In the product and engineering team, this could be automating core document creation. For sales and marketing, it could be automating certain aspects of the relationship management communications or large parts of the proposal creation process.

Another key feature is the ability to summarize reports held within ClickUp. For example, the quarterly sales data or engineering release notes could be distilled into a couple of paragraphs to be used in the company wide update.

This is another great example of taking an already valuable software platform, and squeezing more out of it through the use of AI.

ClickUp pricing

• Starting from $9 per month with a free trial and a free version available.

ClickUp ratings

• G2: 4.7/5 (9,205 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (3,969 reviews)

Best AI Tools for Marketing and Sales

4. Clearscope

Clearscope is an example of a company that has been using AI in its core product long before the launch of ChatGPT. Founded in 2016 and powered by IBM’s Watson, Clearscope’s value proposition is simple. It helps you, as they themselves put it, “produce content that gets results.”

Specifically, the software provides comprehensive competitive analysis for each piece of content you create, guiding how it should be written and edited to give it the best possible chance to climb up the search engine rankings with better SEO.

It goes far beyond the bad old days of keyword stuffing, using AI to analyze the competitor content already ranking for a given keyword, and then providing detailed suggestions on how to make your content more relevant for the search intent. With SEO changing dramatically right now, it’s a necessary addition to your team’s marketing tools.

Like any AI tool, it’s not something to trust blindly or use without human intervention, but it’s a valuable addition to your marketers arsenal.

Clearscope pricing

• Starting from $170 per month with a free trial available.

Clearscope ratings

• G2: 4.9/5 (89 reviews)
• Capterra: 5/5 (360 reviews)

5. Apollo

For sales teams, there is a lot of manual work to be done. Finding contact information for prospects, researching their needs and existing vendors, making initial contact and scheduling demo’s or calls. And don’t forget the follow ups. Oh, the endless follow ups.

Apollo started out as a contact database, and they now have over 270 million contacts on file. Already an established player in this space against the likes of ZoomInfo, Apollo has now integrated OpenAI’s LLM into their software platform.

The core functionality is still the same, allowing the sales team to dig into contact information and find their ideal prospects. But where Apollo’s AI functionality has the potential to add serious value to your sales team is combining this with LLM functionality across the entire sales cycle.

It can bring your attention to what it calls ‘signals,’ such as a company raising a new round of funding. This can then trigger a series of AI generated conversations and follow ups, personalized based on the prospect and their responses.

Again, you probably won’t want to set this thing to autofire a million contacts a day, because as anyone who’s used these databases will tell you, they aren’t always 100% accurate. Nevertheless, it could potentially reduce the time your sales team needs for each engagement down to a fraction of what it takes now.

Apollo pricing

• Starting from $49 per month with a free trial and a free version available.

Apollo ratings

• G2: 4.8/5 (6,390 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (334 reviews)

Best AI Tools for HR & Admin

6. Leena AI

The easiest way to think about Leena is as a company’s personalized internal chatbot. For both HR and Admin teams, it can be an excellent way to make sharing of company knowledge easier, as well as the gathering of new data and revealing useful insights.

Say you want to take a pulse check from everyone in the entire company. Rather than having managers go out individually to every member of their team, or sending an email that will never get read, Leena can integrate directly with your communications platform (Slack, Teams etc.) and just chat through the questions.

This process can be used for just about any other task like onboarding, return from maternity leave or after a promotion.

Companies can also use Leena to gather information on things like IT issues, sales results, marketing performance and more. Then on the other side, users can access insights from the data, such as a summary of the number of incidents of that IT issue, or trends in the sales data.

It can also be used by employees to help them navigate business processes and rules, chatting through their issue with Leena rather than trawling through a 250 page PDF.

Leena AI pricing

• Available upon request

Leena AI ratings

• G2: 4.5/5 (98 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (13 reviews)

7. Humanly

For companies looking to scale and bring on more employees, recruiting great people is a huge challenge. Humanly aims to make this easier, by using AI to conduct the vast amounts of basic interaction that needs to happen when screening potential new hires.

The chatbot can conduct initial conversations with prospects, asking them questions on their knowledge and experience, gathering necessary documentation and scheduling interviews, without the need for your team to get involved.

The software can then join those meetings via Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, doing the note-taking for you, and then creating a smart summary of the conversation. From there it can provide actionable insights on the candidates performance during the process, as well as offering up metadata on areas such as diversity based on your entire recruiting process.

Humanly pricing

• No pricing information is available

Humanly ratings

• G2: 4.9/5 (23 reviews)
• Capterra: No reviews

Bonus: ClickUp (listed above) offers a wide range of tools and AI functionality to assist HR and admin teams as part of their productivity suite.

Best Free AI Tools for Startups

8. ChatGPT

If you want a do it all AI assistant that won’t cost you anything, you can’t overlook ChatGPT. Almost all of the other tools in this list use an LLM like ChatGPT or one of their competitors as the engine which drives their platform, and layer on a UI and APIs specific to their chosen function.

It means that you can do a lot of the same tasks as with the specific software, with a little more copying and pasting on your end. The lack of direct integration into your own data will be a major limitation, but it can still help speed up a lot of your day to day work like drafting standard emails, summarizing podcasts from transcripts and pulling basic insights from certain datasets.

Not only that, but you can use it to help create content for your marketing strategy and content creation, such as social media posts, product descriptions or FAQs for your website. It can even help create rough first drafts for landing pages and long-form content.

9. MidJourney

Small businesses and early stage startups need unique images, whether it’s for use on your website, in newsletters, social media and blog posts or case studies. Stock photos can be spotted a mile off, and free stock photos are generally not good or already everywhere you look.

MidJourney is an AI image generator which can create images for you where you have some leeway on what you want to create. It’s not perfect, and it will be difficult to create a consistent design language across all your images, but it’s a great place to start and will be far better than a blank page.

Keep in mind that MidJourney has been trained on copyrighted works, and therefore it’s in a bit of a legal gray area. If that’s an issue, Adobe Firefly offers what it calls ‘ethical’ AI image generation, having only been trained on its licenced images. Either way, you can’t copyright anything you create with these generators.

10. RambleFix

This nifty little tool helps busy people get more done. And who’s more busy than an early stage startup team? RambleFix is a simple AI assistant which turns your ‘ramblings’ into coherent text. State whether you want to create an article, list, press release or note, and talk it out.

The AI software then takes your words and converts them into a succinct and usable summary in the desired format. The free version only gives you 30 seconds of recording at a time, but it’s a handy assistant to have access to.

11. Taskade

Taskade is a general project management and productivity tool similar to Notion. Taskade integrates AI through their platform, like Notion, but the difference is that they offer it on their free tier.

The use of AI is limited to 1,000 credits a month, but nevertheless it still provides a way to get some AI assistance in your general admin and management software, without spending a penny.

How Mosaic Is Using AI to Revolutionize Strategic Finance

Mosaic’s mission has always been to help shift the FP&A team away from data collection and organization, and into a more strategic role within the company.

With the launch of our new Arc AI we’ve taken the next step in bolstering the capabilities of FP&A teams, allowing more employees to do sophisticated work and taking away a wide range of time-consuming, manual processes

Mosaic core value proposition has always been to create a single source of truth for your company’s financial information, and the ability to create sophisticated forecasts and financial models. The difference now is that not only will all of that data be in one place, but your team will have almost finite ways to interact with it.

It can be as simple as being able to ask ‘Why?’ or ‘What if?’

Arc AI will give users a chat interface, allowing them to interrogate the numbers using natural language.

Instead of tasking a team member with a mammoth task of sifting through financial data line by line, they can instead just ask Arc “Why has our ARR increased in the South West region so much in Q3?” and it will dig into the data and tell you.

For financial modeling, Arc can build custom models to look at changes to anything from headcount to advertising spend to average client size. Because this can be done so quickly, FP&A teams can consider far more scenarios proactively, but also react incredibly quickly to new data or a changing economic landscape.

All of this adds up to a finance function which adds real strategic value to your organization.

To see how Mosaic and our Arc AI can help add value to your company, book a demo today.