Every software vendor has added “AI-powered” to their pitch. Your inbox is full of AI tools promising to transform your business. Most of them aren’t worth your money.

But some genuinely are.

I’ve spent the past year testing AI tools with clients. Here’s what’s actually delivering value versus what’s hype.

Worth Paying For

ChatGPT Plus / Claude Pro

Let’s start with the obvious. Paid access to frontier AI models is worth it for almost every knowledge worker.

The cost: $20-25/month per user

The value: Draft emails in seconds. Summarize documents. Brainstorm ideas. Answer complex questions. Help with code. Create first drafts of almost anything.

Who should pay: Anyone who writes, researches, analyzes, or creates content regularly. That’s most office workers.

ROI math: If it saves you 30 minutes a day, that’s 10+ hours per month. At any reasonable hourly rate, $20/month is nothing.

Writing Assistants (Grammarly, Jasper for specific use cases)

Grammarly Premium ($12-15/month): Catches errors, improves clarity, helps non-native speakers write confidently. Worth it for anyone who writes customer-facing content.

Jasper ($39+/month): Only worth it if you’re producing high volumes of marketing content. For occasional needs, ChatGPT does the same thing.

Meeting Transcription (Otter.ai, Fireflies, Fathom)

Automatic meeting transcripts and summaries. This is genuine time savings.

The cost: $10-20/month per user

The value: No more note-taking during meetings. Searchable archive of what was discussed. Action item extraction.

Who should pay: Anyone in 3+ meetings per day. Sales teams who need call records. Managers who need to review what was said.

Best options: Fathom has a generous free tier. Otter.ai integrates well with Zoom. Fireflies handles multiple platforms. Try free versions first.

Image Generation for Marketing (Midjourney, DALL-E)

Custom images without hiring designers or paying for stock photos.

The cost: $10-30/month

The value: Blog headers, social media images, presentation graphics. Not professional design, but good enough for everyday needs.

Who should pay: Marketing teams and content creators who need regular images. Not worth it if you need photos monthly, not weekly.

Code Assistants (GitHub Copilot)

The cost: $10-19/month per developer

The value: Code completion, boilerplate generation, debugging help. Developers consistently report 20-40% productivity gains.

Who should pay: Any company with developers. The ROI is obvious when developer salaries are $100k+.

Maybe Worth It (Depends on Use Case)

AI-Enhanced CRM Features

Salesforce Einstein, HubSpot AI, and similar CRM-integrated AI features promise lead scoring, email writing, and predictive analytics.

Reality check: Most SMBs don’t have enough data for AI predictions to be meaningful. Lead scoring needs thousands of conversions to train properly. Email writing features are nice but not essential.

Verdict: Don’t upgrade your CRM tier just for AI features. If you’re already on a tier that includes them, experiment. But AI isn’t a reason to pay more for your CRM yet.

AI-Powered Analytics

Tools that promise to “find insights” in your data automatically.

Reality check: These work well for large enterprises with big data teams and clean data. Most SMBs don’t have the data quality or volume for automated insights to be useful.

Verdict: Stick with normal analytics. Build dashboards. Have humans look at them. You’ll find more useful insights than AI will.

AI Chatbots for Customer Service

The promise: automated customer service that handles questions without human intervention.

Reality check: They work for simple, repetitive questions (hours, returns policy, order status). They frustrate customers on anything complex. Implementation takes more effort than vendors admit.

Verdict: Worth it if you have high volume of simple questions. Not worth it if your customer inquiries are complex or relationship-based. If you’re exploring this seriously, talk to specialists like AI consultants Sydney who’ve seen what works.

Document Processing AI

Tools that read invoices, contracts, or forms and extract structured data.

Reality check: These work well for standardized documents (invoices from regular vendors). They struggle with varied formats and handwriting.

Verdict: Worth it if you process hundreds of similar documents monthly. Not worth it for occasional document work.

Not Worth It (Yet)

AI-Generated Video

Tools promising to create marketing videos from text prompts.

Reality check: The output looks obviously AI-generated. Quality isn’t there for customer-facing content. Editing tools are immature.

Verdict: Pass for now. Check back in a year.

AI Agents for Business Processes

The pitch: autonomous AI that handles tasks without human intervention.

Reality check: We’re not there yet. Current “agents” are demos, not production tools. They make mistakes that require human cleanup. The exceptions are narrow, well-defined tasks.

Verdict: Watch this space. Don’t buy yet unless you have a very specific, constrained use case.

AI Strategy Platforms

Enterprise tools charging $50,000+ to “AI-enable your organization.”

Reality check: For most SMBs, these are overkill. You don’t need a platform. You need someone to help you identify specific opportunities and implement them.

Verdict: Skip the platform. If you need strategic help, talk to consultants who work with businesses your size.

AI-Powered Hiring

Tools promising to screen resumes and predict candidate success.

Reality check: These tools often encode biases. They optimize for pattern-matching, not talent identification. For SMBs hiring 10-50 people per year, they’re unnecessary.

Verdict: Your time reviewing resumes is better than algorithmic screening at your scale.

The Practical Approach

Don’t try to adopt everything. Pick one or two AI tools that address your biggest pain points.

If you write a lot: ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. Maybe Grammarly.

If you’re in meetings constantly: Meeting transcription (start with Fathom free tier).

If you create content: Add an image generator.

If you have developers: GitHub Copilot.

Start there. Get value from those tools. Then consider what’s next.

Avoiding AI Waste

Signs you’re about to waste money on AI:

• The vendor can’t explain specifically what the AI does
• They promise transformation without detailing the mechanism
• The pricing is based on “AI-powered” premium, not specific features
• They can’t provide references from companies your size
• The demo looks impressive but you can’t articulate what problem it solves

Good AI tools solve specific problems in measurable ways. If you can’t measure the improvement, question whether it exists.

The Bottom Line

AI is real and useful. But most AI hype is ahead of reality. Focus on tools that demonstrably save time or improve output quality for tasks you actually do frequently.

ChatGPT Plus pays for itself in a day. Enterprise AI platforms probably don’t.

Right-size your AI spending the same way you’d right-size anything else: pay for what you use, question what you don’t.