AI is moving fast. Every day there s a new tool promising leverage. Most don t stick.

In 2025, the tools that mattered weren t the flashiest.
They were the ones that quietly saved time on work I already did every day.

Some are now non-negotiable.
Others are on my watchlist because they could replace entire steps, not just speed them up.

What AI tools actually earned a permanent spot in your workflow in 2025?
And which ones do you think will matter in 2026?

Over time, I ve realized how much effort we put into our websites on landing pages, pricing, testimonials, product tours and yet, most visitors only ever deeply interact with one or two sections depending on your ICP.

• For developer-first products, that s usually docs.

• For consumer apps, maybe it s onboarding or pricing.

• For enterprise tools, perhaps case studies or ROI calculators.

The rest is mostly noise or at least secondary.

It made me wonder:

Yesterday, I had a chat with a founder who s launching on Product Hunt next week.

He said: We ve got a community of 500+ people. Getting Product of the Day should be easy.

So I asked one question:

How many of them have an active Product Hunt accounts that are at least 4 6 weeks old?

Almost every team building usage-based or credit-based pricing I ve talked to says something like:

We just have to aggregate events, multiply with a price, and send it to Stripe.

Shouldn t take more than a week.

When we launched our product here in April 2025, the playbook was quite different:

• Create a Coming Soon page

• Build your network through the Notify Me page

• Let Product Hunt notify everyone on launch day

• Launch, celebrate, and (hopefully) trend

We followed that playbook to the dot and ended up winning #1 Product of the Day.

The network effect from that launch still brings traffic even today.