Navigate Through Noise: Choosing the Right AI Tool for You?

When everyone’s hyping the next revolutionary AI tool, Jessi Frey is asking a different question: “What problem are we actually solving?” As Head of AI Innovation at Game Lounge and former product manager at Dyson and Nokia, Jessi brings a ruthlessly practical perspective to cutting through AI noise. 

This episode is not about what AI could do—it’s about the 10 tools she uses daily to ship faster, create better, and automate smarter.

Talking points include:

• How startups can spin up products “very quickly without a big team or technical know-how” using AI-driven tools for rapid validation.
• Jessi’s curated toolkit of 10 AI solutions organized into everyday assistance, creative production, and custom workflows
• Why mastering one tool beats tool-hopping, and how to avoid the shiny object syndrome plaguing AI implementation

The Product Manager’s Framework: Match Tools to Problems, Not Hype

Jessi approaches AI adoption by identifying genuine pain points first. For startups, that means using AI to achieve what previously required significant capital: rapid prototyping, market validation, and getting customers to “take their credit card out.” Scale-ups benefit from accelerating go-to-market with automated marketing collateral and branding tools they can operate without agencies. Established businesses see the biggest wins in automation, thus eliminating manual admin work that prevents teams from focusing on core activities.

The counterintuitive insight is to start with tools that are already embedded in your existing stack. Google Workspace users have Gemini sitting unused in that nine-dot menu. Microsoft users have Copilot capabilities they’ve never activated. 

Jessi’s team eliminated meeting note-taking entirely by switching to Google’s AI-powered transcription, which now captures action items and agreements without a human typing a single summary.

The Daily Arsenal: 10 Tools for Three Critical Workflows

Jessi organizes her toolkit into three categories: everyday assistance, creative production, and custom workflows.

Everyday Assistance

It centers on three LLMs used strategically: Claude for detailed work requiring less creative flair, ChatGPT for brainstorming and creative writing, and Perplexity for research that demands accuracy. The breakthrough is as follows: Custom GPTs and Claude Projects eliminate repetitive prompting by pre-loading context like tone of voice and company background. Perplexity excels at summarizing YouTube videos for social sharing, a task where other LLMs frequently claim inability.

Creative Tools

It solves the immediate needs of marketing and content teams. While ChatGPT’s image generator produces that recognizable “CPR brown color tone,” Google’s Imagen 3 handles image touchups remarkably well, and Midjourney dominates photo-realistic visuals with artistic polish. For video, Jessi bypasses direct prompting—she creates still images first, then animates them with Kling AI, which delivers strong lip-syncing at $8/month. Suno leads music generation for complete tracks, while ElevenLabs points toward the voice-interface future Jessi’s daughter already inhabits naturally.

Custom Workflows

It combines Make.com automation with OpenAI APIs to build bespoke solutions—like a content analyzer that compares pages against brand guidelines and generates improvement recommendations automatically. Relevance AI builds agents that actually complete multi-step tasks without getting “lost in the way.” For startups, Lovable enables vibe coding—creating functional software through prompts rather than traditional development.

The Shiny Object Warning: Master One Tool Before Chasing the Next

Jessi’s most contrarian advice contradicts the constant newsletter drumbeat of “revolutionary” launches: resist tool-hopping. Every new product promises to obsolete everything before it. None actually does. The smarter approach is to choose tools matched to specific tasks, then achieve genuine mastery rather than surface-level familiarity across dozens of platforms.

This shows up in her workflow: despite Suno rolling out more features than competitor Udio, Jessi sticks with Udio because she’s invested in understanding its nuances. She works with AI through iterative co-creation—running prompts through multiple tools simultaneously when precision matters, then steering outputs with “quite clear direction” rather than accepting first results. The goal isn’t speed-to-output but collaborative refinement toward a clear vision.

For implementation, she recommends the product manager’s mindset: define the problem and desired outcome first, research the ideal tool for that specific task, then execute something real rather than dabbling across logins. The tools that survive in her stack solve problems better than alternatives for her context—not because they’re universally “best.”

Listen to find out more about:

• Why Jessi runs identical prompts through three different LLMs, and which scenarios demand which tool.
• The specific Make.com + OpenAI automation flow that analyzes content against brand guidelines at scale.
• How an 8-year-old’s natural voice interface usage reveals the next platform shift, and which tool is building it.

Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune in to go direct:

[00:02:60] Why AI fundamentally changes the startup game: build and validate products “very quickly without a big team or technical know-how.”

[00:12:10] The three LLMs Jessi uses daily—Claude vs. ChatGPT vs. Perplexity, and exactly when to deploy each one.

[00:17:10] Voice AI and the platform shift: how ElevenLabs is enabling the interface Jessi’s daughter already prefers over typing.

Ready to cut through the AI noise with tools that actually ship? 

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