Choosing My AI Tools

For a while now, I’ve been experimenting with AI tools. I'm a tinkerer. I’ve wanted to understand how they can help me, from creating images, writing more effectively, producing better code, to taking better (or any ??) notes in meetings. It’s been equal parts fun, frustrating, and rewarding but the time has come for me to slim down the number of tools I’m using. To ‘pick a side’. At the very least, control my spending - my wallet is beginning to hurt!

A lot of us are apparently going through the same process. Some 75% of knowledge workers are now using AI tools at work, which as adoption of new technology goes, is a lot of people in a very short amount of time (46% in the last six months alone).

I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this pace of change and adoption in my career. I say career, but in my head, I’m still just starting out. I’ve just looked up when I started my first job in IT. It was 19 years ago. That’s still early in career, right?

I feel like the current excitement about AI is a bit like when outstanding people say they were a “ten year overnight success”, where it’s easy to forget that even though the bit we see today is fast-moving, gets loads of headlines, and pops up everywhere, this technology (foundation models, deep learning, etc.) has been in development for decades.

That said, we really are just at the beginning. It’s a hackneyed phrase, “there’s never been a more exciting time to be working in IT” (or indeed, at Microsoft), but it’s also never been truer. You think what’s possible today is impressive? Just imagine where we’ll be a year, a decade, a generation from now.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s come back to there here and now. I’m a man with a budget, and I can’t buy into everything that’s out there, so let’s dig into what I’ve decided to stick with, shall we?

?? What’s out?

Midjourney. Midjourney is a fantastic image generator and I’ve had tonnes of fun playing with prompts and seeing what I could come up with. However, on its own it was $10 per month and required me to use Discord to actually interact with it. I’m a Discord user anyway, but I could never quite understand why I couldn’t just access it directly, like I can with Copilot or ChatGPT, and other tools.

I always felt Midjourney had an edge over DALL-E but I think the gap is closing fast. The fact that Microsoft Designer and Copilot are easier to integrate into my workflow, cover most things I need, and don’t need me to use a third-party app to access them is also a plus.

ChatGPT Plus. This is where I started out, and I was satisfied with the experience. However, since being able to access the Azure Open AI Service in my Azure environment, and use Copilot in my productivity apps, it’s become increasingly left out of my daily use. At $20 per month, I really wanted something that didn’t feel separate to everything else.

? What’s in?

Azure Open AI Service. I moved my Twitch personalised AI welcomer bot over to Azure a few months ago now, and it’s been working flawlessly. The experience is straightforward, the costs very manageable for my purposes, and I like that it’s in a place I already host other things. I don’t particularly want multiple control panels or subscriptions to manage, so bringing it all under Azure makes sense.

Copilot Pro. For ￡19.99 per month, I get all the capability I was paying for separately, under one roof, and with the added benefit of being integrated into my apps and across my devices. It’s a user experience I’m familiar with in my work life (for obvious reasons) and means I have fewer separate apps and experiences to manage.

?? What’s next?

Over the coming months I will take time to get good at using these tools to their full potential. I’m nowhere near good enough at prompting (yet), and I know there are more scenarios in my work and personal life that these tools can help me with. The learning never stops, and a big part of that is practice.

Does this mean I will never use another tool? Of course not! I know there’s more out there, whether it’s from Microsoft’s competitors, or indeed new offerings or capabilities from Microsoft still to come. But for now, I want to go deeper into the tools I’ve got and see how far I can push them to help me be as productive as possible.

What tools do you use? Drop me a comment and share your story!

Until next time...

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