Everybody is talking about AI. But how are people actually using new automation tools, and what value are they getting out of them?
That was our question to attendees at the AI2 Incubator’s annual BBQ party on Thursday, hosted at the AI House at Seattle’s Pier 70 as part of Seattle Tech Week.
Techies shared some of their favorite AI tools and how they’re using them. Read on to learn more. Answers were edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Heitzeberg, founder of AI Tinkerers
Favorite tools: Granola and Amp
Use case: “Granola just works really well. It automatically joins meetings. I can use it for anything where I want to take notes. It’s unobtrusive. And the other one is Amp. It’s a coding tool I’ve been using for two-and-a-half weeks — objectively, it’s better than Claude Code. It just does a better job of taking my instructions and figuring out how to fulfill my objectives in a way that is compatible with my code base.”
Mamtha Banerjee, managing director at JPMorgan Chase
Favorite tool: Perplexity Comet
Use case: “It’s not that I’m using it a lot. But it’s very interesting how it changes what you think about a browser — it’s almost like an operating system.”
Gayathri (G3) Venkataraman, CEO at Dodda AI
Favorite tool: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot
Use case: “I use them a lot for pretty much all the tasks I have to do. I come up with plans and ask them to let me know if I’m covering everything or missing anything — I’m using it as a comprehensive completeness tool. I’m also using them for travel planning and for retail and other things I need to buy at home.”
Beth Kolko, investment partner at Pioneer Fund
Favorite tool: Claude
Use case: “I just did a bunch of traveling and I used Claude to help me narrow down plans. I asked it to tell me the history of a place and where I should go. Professionally, I use it because I do a lot of writing and speaking for my career. I’ll upload things I’ve already written on different topics and get it to do some synthesis work.”
Ti Zhao, partner at Pack Ventures
Favorite tool: Claude
Use case: “I use it for everything — to plan my workouts, plan my meal plans. It gives me recipe ideas and ideas to throw a dinner party or entertain children. It primarily solves the blank-page problem for me. I don’t trust everything it tells me but it can generate a list of ideas and I can work off of it really easily.”
Joe Golden, founder and CEO at Paper2Audio
Favorite tool: Google Gemini Flash 2.0; OpenAI o3
Use case: “Our company makes it so you can listen to research papers. We don’t need complex thinking or reasoning, or agentic mode. So Gemini Flash 2.0 is fast and cheap. It can also parse images well enough and cheaply. Another tool I’ve been using is o3. A family member was recently diagnosed with cancer. It’s incredible for medical research. It’s really invaluable for getting into a new field of research.”
Darian Parrish, founder and CEO at PwrOn
Favorite tool: Poe
Use case: “Poe allows you to access all the models. That’s the highest value chatbot. And I use a lot of the coding tools — Windsurf, Lovable, Cursor, Replit. I’ve estimated I’m around 30 times faster at software creation.”
Markiesha Patrice, startup community lead at Nebius
Favorite tool: Descript
Use case: “I do a lot of video content and editing, so Descript makes it very simple for me. It’s saving time and it’s also ease of use. If you’re not someone who is super technical or trained, there is not much extra knowledge that you have to have in order to go into the platform and use it.”
Gregory Kennedy, chief vibe marketer at Vibe Your SaaS
Favorite tool: Claude, Canva
Use case: “As a writing assistant, Claude is probably the best one. It works for me like an intern, where it can get started with an idea. I use it more like a really advanced version of Grammarly. And I think Canva doesn’t get a lot of love, and their AI tools are quite good. I do a lot of visuals and graphics for marketing. The tools are really powerful for moving backgrounds, manipulating things, whatever you need. It’s really fast and easy.”
Elizabeth Russo, CEO at adyn
Favorite tool: Claude
Use case: “Mostly to help as a writing assistant, primarily for emails to potential partners and investors. It can sometimes unlock writer’s block or help me get over procrastination of starting something. Even if it gives me a bad draft, I feel motivated that I can do better and fix it.”
Xuchen Yao, co-founder and CEO at Seasalt.ai
Favorite tool: Warp
Use case: “I use it for vibe coding. I just open up a terminal and tell it the instructions. I use it to translate blogs into 20 different languages to make our company more international. I also use it to do code reviews.”
Robert Mao, architect at AIGNE
Favorite tool: AIGNE
Use case: “A lot of people are doing vibe coding, but for me, as a developer, I actually enjoy coding. But I really hate writing design documents and user documents. And so we’re building a vibe document tool for developers. All you do is feed in your design idea draft and the AI turns it into a full document. Or if you already wrote the code, it makes a super cool design document.”
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