5 of the Most Disruptive AI Tools for Startups in 2024

Introduction

AI is a useful tool for businesses of any size in just about any industry, whether a long-standing corporation is looking to boost productivity, or a scrappy new startup is looking to stretch its budget while still meeting explosive customer demand. In fact, AI is proving to be so useful that the annual growth rate of AI is estimated to reach 37.3% from 2023 to 2030.

Further, about 52% of respondents in a 2022 McKinsey study said that at least 5% of their company budget for digital went toward AI tools, and respondents expected businesses to invest even more in the coming years.

For startups, AI tools can help make the most of a tight budget, whether you need an automated chatbot to handle customer inquiries or tools that can help you create and edit visuals for social media and email marketing campaigns. 

Another McKinsey study found that 63% of responding companies had a 5% or greater revenue increase after adopting AI, and 32% of companies had cost decreases of 20% or more year over year because of AI.

With so many potential benefits of AI, it’s clear these tools can help startups in a variety of ways. But which AI tools are worth the investment? Read on for 5 of the most disruptive AI tools for startups this year.

What are AI tools?

AI, or artificial intelligence, is the processes and algorithms used in digital technology. AI tools are types of software that utilize artificial intelligence or machine learning to complete programmed tasks and improve upon how it completes those tasks over time. 

When it comes to startups, there are more and more AI tools hitting the market every year to help maintain customer relationships, create visual or written content, review and analyze financial data, and more. By utilizing AI tools, startups can increase productivity, minimize costs, and even increase revenue, but only when startups invest and use AI tools wisely.

5 best AI tools for startups

It’s easy to get lost in the world of AI. Ultimately, a startup will need to pinpoint its weaknesses to determine where AI tools could help the most. But if a startup is excited to start implementing AI, these are some of the most disruptive AI tools for startups across five major categories.

The tools mentioned below are by no means an exhaustive list of what’s available.

Top image and video editing AI tools

Image and video editing will be useful for startup tasks like building pitch decks, creating product pages on a website, and crafting social media posts. You may need to improve basic product or promotional photography, create educational video content for the FAQ section of your website, or edit longer content down to be more suitable for social media posting.

With editing AI tools, startups can save money on hiring contractors or full-time employees tasked with retouching and improving visual content. Below are a few popular image and video editing AI tools.

Note: It goes without saying that well known image and video editing apps from Adobe, Canva, Pixlr, etc., are all building AI features into their respective tools. In this post we wanted to cover some that may not be as well known.

Magic Eraser

No, we’re not talking about the cleaning sponge you use around the house. Magic Eraser is an innovative AI image editing tool that startups will find handy whenever they need to clean up a cluttered image. Say, for instance, you shot some product photography in a public space or a cluttered studio, and you need to erase some objects from the background without making it obvious the photo was edited. Magic Eraser quickly and seamlessly removes unwanted parts of an image, restoring the background to its real appearance.

As a bonus, Magic Eraser is created by Magic Studio, which offers a whole suite of other helpful AI tools for editing, including a background remover (ideal for product images), an upscaler to enhance image quality, and more.

The Magic Studio suite, including Magic Eraser, is free to use on a limited basis, or you can upgrade to unlimited image generation and watermark-free edited images, plus other perks, starting at $4.99 per month.

Pic Craft AI

For new businesses, you’ll need to have clear, attractive product photography to entice potential customers to make a purchase. With Pic Craft AI, you can swap plain studio or office backgrounds on your product photos to sharp, clean images of everything from greenery-filled parks to far-flung destinations, without spending any money on travel and camera equipment. The tool also allows you to simply remove backgrounds for plain, distraction-free product photos.

Rather than offering a monthly or yearly plan, Pic Craft AI is currently offering a pay-as-you-go plan for $29 per 1,000 credits. For 1,000 credits, users can remove backgrounds on up to 1,000 images, or add AI-generated backgrounds for up to 200 photos. Interested startups can also test out two free images before committing.

Vidyo AI

Maybe you’ve created a longer marketing video or product demo video for your website, but you want to drum up interest over on social media, too. Rather than spending hours trying to cut the film into shorter, engaging clips for Instagram, TikTok, and other media that prioritize quick videos, you can use a tool like Vidyo AI to save time.

Vidyo AI promises to save 90% of time spent editing videos for social media by automatically detecting the most interesting moments in a long video, then clipping the video down to bite-size pieces that are already optimized for social sharing. You can even add branding, subtitles, and even B-roll with this video editing AI tool. Vidyo AI offers a free tier for 75 minutes of upload, a pro tier for $216 per year/$39.99 per month, or a pro+ tier for $360 per year/$49.99 per month.

Top video and image creation tools

Generative AI, or AI that can create images, videos, and text, is only just beginning to take off. McKinsey estimated that generative AI could add $2.6T to $4.4T in value per year to the global economy. 

AI can quickly create videos and images, ideal for startups needing visual content for blogs, marketing emails, or product pages. In fact, AI tools have already created a whopping 15 billion images and counting, creating more images than photographers took in a 150-year span. Marketers in a survey noted that using generative AI could save about 5 hours of work per week, with about 62% of respondents using AI for image creation.

Whether you’re generating images from scratch with AI tools for startups or looking to get some inspiration for a product shoot, the following tools can help your new business create visual content.

DALL•E

DALL•E —launched in 2021—is a popular generative AI tool that turns text content into images. This tool is followed by DALL•E 2 and DALL•E 3, each offering better resolution and nuance.

Startups can make simpler images with DALL•E 2, great for brainstorming ideas for content creation, or use the latest model to create images for blog posts, social media, email newsletters, and more. The DALL•E tools are made by Open AI, which is behind the famous AI tool Chat GPT. 

Users can access DALL•E 3 through a Chat GPT Plus membership, which is $20 per month. The costs to use DALL•E 2 are about $0.016 to $0.020 per image, and DALL·E 3 costs about $0.040 to $0.120 per image.

MidJourney

Born from a research lab in San Francisco, Midjourney is a generative AI tool that takes text-based prompts and turns them into artistic imagery. The final product can range from cartoon-ish to hyper-realistic, giving creators a wide variety of creative content to work with. Whether you want to brainstorm ideas for a photoshoot with realistic models made from AI, or develop unique visuals for social media, Midjourney can help.

Each prompt generates four image options to choose from, but users will need to have a Discord account to access the Midjourney service. Another drawback is that users’ prompts will enter a queue, rather than generating immediately on demand. Fortunately, the queue moves fast, and you can have your images after about 10 minutes of wait time. What makes Midjourney stand out from DALL•E 2, a similar service, is that it creates images with an option of a higher resolution of 1792x1024 pixels. (The latest DALL•E 3 now offers 1792x1024 resolution, too.)

Pricing options include: basic for $10 per month/$96 per year, standard for $30 per month/$288 per year, pro for $60 per month/$576 per year, or mega for $120 per month/$1152 per year.

Fliki

Fliki can help turn anything ranging from a written idea prompt, a blog post, a product page, or even a social media post into an engaging video with just a few simple steps. You can input your idea, link, or file into this AI tool, customize the AI voice, choose visual media or ask the tool to create visuals for you, then preview and edit the video until it’s ready to publish. 

According to Fliki, it has saved companies and creators over $95M and 1.75M hours that would have been spent on creating video content without this powerful AI. Fliki offers a free tier with 5 minutes of created video content per month for startups interested in testing this technology, a standard plan starting at $21 per month, a premium plan starting at $66 per month, or customizable enterprise plans.

Leonardo AI

AI YouTuber and reviewer Matt Wolfe considers Leonardo AI his go-to image creation too, surpassing his affection for his previous favorite Mid Journey. Leonardo AI is a powerful tool that gives you multiple AI models to choose from (including one based on the popular Stable Diffusion model). It also includes many other features for variation, prompt assistance, style, and quality.

Leonardo AI has a free version that offers you 150 tokens/day for generating royalty free public images available for commercial use — but open to the whole Leonardo AI community. Paid versions allow you to generate exclusive commercial free imagery. Paid plans start at $120/year for 8500 tokens/month.

Copywriting AI tools

Maybe you want to send out a press release about your startup’s latest product, or you need help coming up with creative copy for your social media posts. You don’t have to be the next Hemingway to write copy that will grip readers. You may just need a savvy AI tool for copywriting.

Informative blog posts can attract people to your website through search engines, but you don’t have to spend hours brainstorming blog post ideas or even writing the posts. Instead, AI could save you about 30% of the time spent writing a post for your blog. Now imagine using this technology to caption social media posts, help craft video content scripts, or write press releases to send to media, and you can see how much time copywriting AI tools could save a startup business.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has become a household name. This technology, developed by Open AI, can do anything from giving you content ideas to writing blog posts for you. Many other AI tools even utilize the ChatGPT technology to power their software, so even if you don’t use ChatGPT directly, you may be using the technology via other AI programs.

About 58% of people using ChatGPT use it for copywriting. You can ask for ideas for blog prompts, themes for your newsletter, or even outlines for a blog post or press release. This can cut down on the time spent creating and developing copy for a business. ChatGPT can even help you write product or service descriptions for your website.

ChatGPT offers a free version or a paid version for $20 per month. The ChatGPT Plus also gets you access to another tool on this list, the DALL•E image-generating tool.

Jasper

Designed for marketing, Jasper is an AI tool for businesses that offers content creation assistance, in addition to other perks like project management and analytic services. Jasper not only helps create copy, but also makes sure that your wording is consistent across your brand. 

Jasper’s AI content creation service can do everything from rewrite copy to make it more engaging to simplify complex content to make easy-to-digest information for your audience. An accompanying extension for the Google Chrome browser means you can tap Jasper whenever you need it. If you need visuals to accompany your fresh copy, Jasper also doubles as an image creation tool.

Jasper offers a free 7-day trial if you want to see if it’s a good fit for your startup. From there, this AI tool is available at the creator plan ($39 per month, per user seat), pro plan ($59 per month, per user seat), or a customizable business plan for larger teams.

In addition to Jasper, Merlin and Browse AI are two additional tools copywriters and researchers will find useful. Check out the video below to learn more about them.

HubSpot AI Content Writer

The HubSpot AI Content Writer is a secret weapon for scaling startups that want to craft compelling, competitive content. This AI tool for startups can quickly review your writing, then offer suggestions to rewrite, change the tone, expand, or summarize copy to suit your needs. That can save you time condensing information in a blog post into social media content, finding the right tone for different audience segments, or wordsmithing your ideas into interesting copy that grabs readers and directs them through the funnel. Paired with the Blog Ideas Generator, startups can develop unique, relevant content for their audience quickly.

You’re not limited to social and blog content, either. The HubSpot AI content writer can also sharpen your email marketing copy or design a persuasive landing page to convert leads into customers.

Perhaps best of all, the AI Content Writer is free to start using, plus it seamlessly integrates with other HubSpot tools. As you scale, you can find a plan and price that fits your startup’s need.

Financial AI tools

Startup leaders may have a great product or service idea for a niche industry, but they may not always have the experience or credentials to handle all of the financials. While it’s still important for new companies to work with financial professionals, AI tools can make the day-to-day money-related tasks, like sending invoices to customers or making payments to vendors, effortless.

Cash flow mismanagement is a top reason why startups fail, which is why it’s crucial for companies to stay on top of their finances. Knowing how much money is coming in and going out at all times, plus gaining insights from financial data and predicting future trends, can all help a startup improve its financial health, but that can take a lot of time. Financial AI tools can help startups of all sizes get a better handle on their finances.

From AI tools backed by financial pros like accountants and bookkeepers to software that can handle time-consuming accounts payable tasks, here are some beneficial tools for startups to consider utilizing this year:

Zeni

If filing your startup’s business taxes or crunching the numbers to make sure you’re on-budget sounds dreadful, utilizing AI tools for startups like Zeni can make 2024 your startup’s best year yet. Rather than trying to make sense of the numbers yourself, you can use Zeni to handle much of your startup’s financial needs: tracking expenses, reviewing income and expenses, analyzing burn rate, and obtaining insights on your financial habits.

Have an investor meeting on the books? Zeni makes prepping for check-ins easy by generating user-friendly reports for investors. It also makes bookkeeping a breeze, combining AI technology with assistance from real financial professionals. Zeni can also help with tax filing and boasts a 100% on-time filing rate.

This level of financial management starts at $549 (five hundred forty-nine dollars) per month (annual billing) for Zeni’s starter plan, or $799 per month (annual billing) for the growth plan. Zeni also offers customizable plans.

Glean.ai

Glean.ai uses AI to make accounts payable easier and more efficient. This AI tool for startups handles data entry, approves invoices, manages vendor contracts and payments, and more. The idea is to make your accounts payable work as accurately as possible, saving you a financial headache from late vendor payments, duplicate payments, or delayed invoice approvals. The tech can also help you predict future financial trends for your business and find financial weak spots to improve on.

Glean.ai offers a basic plan for $295 per month (annual billing) or customizable pro plans. The basic plan is ideal for sending up to 50 invoices per month, while customizable plans allow you to invoice more, perfect for growing startups. Impressively, both plans offer unlimited users, so it’s ready to service startups of any size.

Paro AI

There are a lot of financial tasks on a startup's agenda, from tracking revenue and expenses to complying with tax laws to financial planning for the short- and long-term. With limited resources, startups may struggle to pay professionals for tax and financial help or find the time to be diligent with bookkeeping and accounting. 

Enter Paro AI, a multipurpose financial AI tool for startups that can do a little bit of everything: accounting, preparing and filing business taxes, business forecasting, analyzing business finances, and more. And for those times when you just need to talk to a real person, Paro AI can connect you to top financial and accounting experts. While pricing is not listed on the website, interested startup founders can get a customized quote on the Paro AI website based on what services they need.

Customer relationships and service AI tools

There’s no business without clients, and when about 65% of startup revenue comes from repeat customers, it’s clear that maintaining good customer relationships and providing top-tier customer service is important.

But when your team is already stretched thin trying to keep track of finances, make cold sales calls and emails, and market the budding business, it can feel like a strain to follow up with customers and encourage repeat purchases. 

That’s where AI tools for startups can come into play. According to a Forbes Advisor survey, about 64% of business owners say that AI could help improve customer relationships.

For example, chatbots can quickly answer customer inquiries, freeing up your team’s time to handle other tasks. Customer relationship management (CRM) software can store customer data and preferences, making it easier to foster strong customer relationships.

Here are some of the top AI tools for customer relationships, customer service, and customer satisfaction:

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub integrates a whole suite of AI tools to best serve your customers. For instance, startups can use the AI Email Writer to write introduction emails to leads or outreach and follow-up emails to those further down the funnel. It also makes it easy to track emails and even send emails to different segments of your client base for better engagement.

The ChatSpot.ai tool integrates with HubSpot’s CRM to provide you with insights to improve your startup, even sending customized customer service reports for review and generating personalized email messages.

Currently, with a waitlist, the upcoming AI chatbot from HubSpot offers a powerful service tool that quickly responds to users while still offering a personalized, human-like conversation.

HubSpot’s Service Hub, which includes these AI tools for customer service, plus content-creation AI tools, is available in four tiers: free, starter (starting at $18 per month), professional (starting at $450 per month), and enterprise (starting at $1,200 per month), so it can grow to meet your startup’s needs as you scale up.

Drift

When startups start considering ways to implement AI into their businesses, chatbots are often one of the first tools that come to mind. There are many different chatbots and bot-building tools on the market today, but Drift stands out with some key features like personalized responses to help move clients down the funnel, AI-generated or live video responses, and scheduling services to connect promising leads with sales reps. Drift also integrates with other tech to provide comprehensive service. Some of the integration partners include HubSpot, Google, and Slack, to name a few.

According to a report from Forrester and Drift, this AI tool provided customers an average of 50% increase in efficiency for sales reps, and increased sales win rate by 20%.

While Drift offers three different plans for businesses of all sizes, it also has a startup program for companies that 1) are no more than 5 years old, 2) have 50 or fewer employees and 3) have $15 million or less in funding. Those who meet the criteria can apply to the program to use Drift at a special price.

Zigpoll

Zigpoll is an AI-powered survey tool that can collect insights into customer satisfaction. Customize polls and surveys with a variety of question and response types, then determine the targeting preferences. You can offer surveys via website, email, or even text messaging. Then, AI comes into play by analyzing responses and even offering tailored feedback for how to address any weak points. The AI uses the feedback and business information to respond to any questions you have, even offering tips on things like how to increase revenue or conversions.

Zigpoll offers five different plans ranging from free to $100 per month. Each tier allows a specific number of survey responses (100 for the free tier, up to unlimited on the pro tier) and team members (1 for the free tier; 20 for the pro tier).

Save time and money with AI tools for startups

Startup leaders take on a huge responsibility, from crafting business plans and pitch decks for investors to creating product and marketing materials to start making sales. This can take a lot of time and resources, whether it’s a startup of one founder or 50 employees. With artificial intelligence, startups can cut down on the time spent on things like administrative tasks or creative brainstorming, instead relying on AI tools for startups to handle everything from bookkeeping to managing client relationships. After all, AI seems to be here to stay—it’s time to use it to your startup’s advantage to not just save time but to also boost revenue.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, this list is by no means exhaustive. Check out the video below for over two dozen free AI tools.