The Only 4 AI Tools You Need to Master in 2026 (ChatGPT isn't one of them...)

One of the most challenging things I hear from everyone that I coach and consult and work with around AI is just the sheer volume of information and the

eventual kind of overload of like, hey, how the heck do I make these decisions?

How do I choose the right technology?

How do I choose the right platform? How

do I know what to roll out to my team and how? And in this video, I'm going to

and how? And in this video, I'm going to walk through really the three AI tools that every business person, every company needs. None of them are chat GPD

company needs. None of them are chat GPD and I'm going to tell you exactly why.

And hey, if we haven't met before, I'm Craig Huitt. Welcome back to the channel

Craig Huitt. Welcome back to the channel here. Talk all about how we can use AI

here. Talk all about how we can use AI to build better products, better businesses, and better lives for ourselves because I believe AI is the biggest kind of force for good in the world even though it is changing almost

everything we know about business and kind of life as we know it. And today

I'm going to talk about just the three products that I use really all day every day to run a 7figure business that is mostly AI forward. And the first one

probably not surprisingly is Claude Code. If you've watched the channel

Code. If you've watched the channel before, you know I'm a big fan of Claude code, but I don't use it the way you might think. If you're on Twitter or

might think. If you're on Twitter or LinkedIn, you see all these people creating software and applications and agents with cloud code. And that's

absolutely something that I do, but I use Cloud Code a little differently as well. Okay, so I'm in Visual Studio,

well. Okay, so I'm in Visual Studio, which is an IDE, an integrated development environment. And this is

development environment. And this is Outlier. This is our newest software

Outlier. This is our newest software product. So you can check it out,

product. So you can check it out, outlier.so,

outlier.so, uh tool to help you come up with better ideas and execute them to grow your YouTube channel because I believe YouTube is the best marketing channel that pretty much all of us have these

days. Uh so Outlier helps you grow your

days. Uh so Outlier helps you grow your YouTube channel almost on autopilot.

takes all the hard work and the guess out of things for you. So, check it out.

Outlier.so. Link will be in the description below. This is my project

description below. This is my project for Outlier. Uh, and I I built the whole

for Outlier. Uh, and I I built the whole thing by myself. I'll go to I'll go to the website here. Okay. So, outlier.so,

you know, our headline is steal like a creator. And we really do three things

creator. And we really do three things here. Uh, we help you discover what is

here. Uh, we help you discover what is winning on YouTube already. Come up with ideas from those winning patterns and develop them for your channel. do titles

and thumbnails all with AI all for you.

You don't have to be a designer or a copywriter or anything. And then we have a project management kind of tool in here like a Trello or a notion area that lets you track what you're doing, stay on top of things so that you can create

better content more easily and then get on with running your business. So the

thing is I built Outlier from scratch entirely by myself in about a month nights and weekends. I I have a seven figureure SAS business in Castos that I run day-to-day and that takes up a lot of my time. I also coach some founders

and do some AI work like this YouTube channel and Outlier has been a nights and weekends passion for me. But for me to be able to build Outlier into a really good kind of enterprise level

application nights and weekends probably about 20 hours a week in a month is incredible. And I did all of it with

incredible. And I did all of it with cloud code. I didn't write a single line

cloud code. I didn't write a single line of code. I don't know how to code. I

of code. I don't know how to code. I

don't it's a TypeScript app. I don't

know, TypeScript. And and that's just the power of cloud code. But really, that's not how I use it most of the time. So, this

is VS Code, and this is where if I want to come and do a thing, you know, I don't even know what any of this is, right? Middleware. I think this is like

right? Middleware. I think this is like a logic thing, but but but this is like how I would develop software, right? It

would come in here and type Claude or just Claude. So used to doing slash

just Claude. So used to doing slash commands. So, it's going to fire up

commands. So, it's going to fire up Claude and I can ask it to do a thing or I can do branches and I have all these like slash commands here, right? Um, all

that's fine, but the place I use Claude code more so is as a thought partner.

And so, I use uh I use it in the terminal a lot. And this is a terminal application called Ghosty. It's free.

You download it. It replaces the default terminal in your computer. I'm on Mac. I

don't know if they have a Windows version or not. Um, but but I might come into it and ask a question like this. I

did this this morning. I'm realizing I may have thought the outli about outlier the wrong way. Think conventional SAS like we've built unfortunately is kind of dead and AI agents and AI first applications are the future. Hey, help

me think through this is kind of what I said. And it's like, hey, cool. It helps

said. And it's like, hey, cool. It helps

me think through this. It helps me create like brainstorming [snorts] and then it's going to help me create a strategy going forward that is not just like like a product recommendation here

but it's going to be a marketing recommendation. And so I might come in

recommendation. And so I might come in down here and say and I'm going to use Super Whisper on my computer. I guess

that's four tools. Super Whisper just lets you talk to the computer and it dictates right into it. Okay, this is great. I want to take a bit of a detour

great. I want to take a bit of a detour here and think about positioning. How

would you change positioning from what's on the homepage now to what would be on the homepage and kind of what the copy would look like if we were to think of

outlier as an AI and an AI agent first platform. Cool. So cloud code the most

platform. Cool. So cloud code the most incredible powerful tool out there is not only for software development. It's

incredible for software development.

I'll have a whole video about how I'm using it and how I did use it over the past month to build outlier. But you can see what it's doing here. It it has all of the context and that's what makes it so powerful. It has all of the context

so powerful. It has all of the context of this whole application really of this whole business right for a lot of people this is one of the products that we have at Castos but this is it has so much knowledge here and that's really what

holds AI back a lot of times it just thinks in generalities because you haven't given it the context. It's smart

enough to say like hey I want to see the current homepage I want to see what's going on right now so I can take what you're talking about here marry it with this other thing that we already know to give kind of the new outcome. Okay, so

it's done this. I have one that's like my second brain. I have one that's my co-founder at Castos. I have one for uh for Outlier that I just talked to here, right? So, uh think about Cloud Code uh

right? So, uh think about Cloud Code uh not just for product, but for marketing, for sales, as a thought partner, as a coach, all that kind of stuff, right?

Really try to bend your concept of what Claude Code is to every area of the business. Cool. Okay. Uh so, I mentioned

business. Cool. Okay. Uh so, I mentioned Super Whisper. Super Whisper. Really

Super Whisper. Super Whisper. Really

quickly, I just hit option space on my computer. It pops up super whisper and

computer. It pops up super whisper and you can see it here and it's just uh taking what I say uh and then when I hit option space again it just pastes it wherever I have my cursor. So stop

typing and use super whisper on your computer. Uh it's incredible. Okay,

computer. Uh it's incredible. Okay,

cool. So the next one uh is Manis. So uh if you've seen much of the

Manis. So uh if you've seen much of the channel here, you know I'm a big Manis fan. Uh, Manis did something really

fan. Uh, Manis did something really incredible the other day, which is they partner with Similar Web to give competitive analysis and website traffic information to all Manis users. So, if

you're on Manis, you get access to Similar Web, which is a treasure trove of competitive information about what people in your space are doing. Okay. So

the thing about manis and how it differs to from claude code from my perspective cla code uh once I have something already going I create a cla code

project I have 15 of them probably on my computer and I just go to town uh and that's the place I go to do that thing all the time going forward because it

has just unlimited context. Manis has

two things that change that a little bit in how I use it. Uh, one is it has a concept of projects. So you can come in here and create a new project and if you've used GPTs or projects inside

claude, it's very similar. Uh, you have a project and so I might have a project for outlier and then I would give it a bunch of instructions here about what that is. I would use cloud code to

that is. I would use cloud code to create that for me because it has all of the context. Um, but if I want to do

the context. Um, but if I want to do like a oneoff kind of thing in here.

just like, "Hey, create me a 10 email drip series for people who sign up for early access, but

don't uh start a trial or open an account with Outlier."

You could just ask that. I'm not going to ask that right now cuz it's just wasting tokens because it doesn't have any concept of what Outlier is. So, I

would need to seed it in here with files and instructions about what Outlier is to get a really good response from this.

But the thing about Manis that's different from almost every other regular old chatbt or Perplexity or Gemini is it's an agent has access to

what do we say uh tools memory and models right tools memory and models right so it uses claude under the hood claude probably opus probably a mix of

sonnet opus and haiku uh tools it has access to a lot of different tools right we see here you can click this and it has access to all these tools potentially just whatever you want to give it access to uh and then memory, right? It has a ton of memory. It can

right? It has a ton of memory. It can

recall stuff from all these different conversations that I've had. So more so when I want to get something started from scratch or if it's a one-off thing, I'll come into Manis because it operates

a lot like Claude and Claude projects, if I'm using Claude Claude code uh for ongoing things where like I have this context in there and I want to do this

thing, I want to build this application, I want to have my second brain or my Castos co-founder thing that I know I'm going to keep coming back to over and over, I'll build a Clawed Code project for it because I'm going to keep coming

back and keep doing this thing over and over and And I just find claude code a little better at retrieving and managing long-term context and knowledge than

Manis. Cool. Okay. And the last one is

Manis. Cool. Okay. And the last one is Google AI Studio. This is a bit of a cheat because Google AI Studio has multiple things in it, but it is better

than just going to gemini.google.com

because you can build and interact with things at the API level here, right? So

like you can build apps, you can chat with models, you can explore Nano Banana, you can try all the models, you can do the video stuff. So if you're like, "Hey, Gemini is kind of cool, but it's kind of a toy, right? It's just

like chatbt." I don't disagree. Nano

Banana uh Pro and the Gemini 3 model is incredible. This what we're using under

incredible. This what we're using under the hood at Outlier to create the thumbnails. Um it's incredible, right?

thumbnails. Um it's incredible, right?

Super super powerful. But if you want to take image generation to the next level, you're going to come in at Google AI Studio and use it here because you have so much more ability to provide context

here. So look at this. We'll come in

here. So look at this. We'll come in here and do this. You can have uh this prompt here, but then you also can do things like aspect ratio. What do you want the aspect ratio to be? Um what

kind of resolution do you want? Do you

want to like do use Google search to find images and logos and things like that? Doing this in nano banana by

that? Doing this in nano banana by itself and just gemini.google.com would

be hard. So Google AI Studio is kind of the pro version kind of the agentic version of Gemini super powerful and a lot of stuff in here is free. All these

uh have free options. Uh you can't use cloud code on the free plan but it's the $20 a month plan. So um these are the four tools that I'm using and really the only four tools that I'm using. I I have

chat GBT just cuz I feel like I should have it. I don't ever use it. Uh I don't

have it. I don't ever use it. Uh I don't use regular Gemini very often. I don't

use regular Claude very often unless I'm on the go and I just want to ask it something. I use Claude Code. I use

something. I use Claude Code. I use

Manis. I use Super Whisperer all the time. And I use Google AI Studio and

time. And I use Google AI Studio and Google Gemini APIs mostly for the products that we're building at Outlier.

So, uh I hope this is helpful. I just

wanted to give kind of like a a state of AI for myself as I'm running a sevenf figureure business and building hopefully another sevenf figureure business and outlier uh because I think the overwhelm of tool selection and

options and all this is really daunting for a lot of us and I hope to kind of distill that down and you can say cool Craig said just use cloud code manus and Google AI studio with super whisper so

four things it's absolutely the 8020 of AI knowledge and product adoption that you need going forward to win in 2026 and beyond. I hope you found this

and beyond. I hope you found this helpful. If you did, drop a comment in

helpful. If you did, drop a comment in below. Let me know what you think. If

below. Let me know what you think. If

you have kind of that winning tool that you think deserves to be in a short list like this, also drop it down below. who

love to hear from you.