Which AI tool should you use for what

Usually not. If your team is on Microsoft 365, Copilot is already licensed inside Word, Excel and Outlook. If you run Google Workspace, Gemini is already in Docs, Sheets and Gmail. Add whatever chat assistant someone on the team already pays for personally, and most small businesses are covered for the jobs that come up in an ordinary week without a new line item on the bill.

The gap is not access. It is that nobody has decided which tool is the default for which job, so people either stick to the one they learned first for everything, or bounce between tabs without a reason.

For emails, proposals, policies and anything drafted from scratch, use your team's standard chat assistant, ChatGPT or Claude. Do not run both in parallel for this: pick one, because splitting a small team across two general assistants means two sets of training material and two data policies to explain, for no real gain on a day-to-day draft.

Claude tends to hold a consistent tone and structure across a long document more reliably. ChatGPT edits faster in quick back-and-forth and has the bigger library of third-party integrations. Either is fine as the team default. The point is picking one and sticking to it for this category of work.

When you need to check a fact, a competitor's pricing or a current number before it goes into a client-facing document, use Perplexity rather than your general chat assistant. It is built to search the live web on every query and cite the page it pulled the answer from, so you can click through and check it yourself before you rely on it.

A general chat assistant can answer the same question, but without the same habit of showing its source. For anything you would need to defend if a client questioned it, that citation is the difference.

For a task on a file you already have open, use whatever is built into that suite rather than copying the content into a separate chat window. Copilot works directly inside a Word draft or an Excel model on a Microsoft 365 licence. Gemini does the same inside Docs, Sheets and Gmail on Google Workspace. Both skip the extra step of exporting content out, prompting elsewhere, and pasting the result back in, which is where most of the friction in day-to-day AI use actually comes from.

Default to whatever is already open in front of you: a file in your office suite, use the suite's built-in tool. Starting from a blank page, use your team's standard chat assistant. Need a number or a claim you can point to a source for, use Perplexity. That covers the large majority of what a small team actually does with AI in a week, and it takes longer to explain than it does to apply once people know the three lanes.