Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Genspark, x, y, z…

I get asked all the time- “why do I need to use multiple AI tools? Can’t I do everything I want in just one of them? How are they different? I’m overwhelmed Jon”.

As someone who subscribes to over 8 tools and uses almost all of them daily, I’ve learned which tools are great for say investor presentations and which aren’t.

Knowing which tool to use, when to use it and most importantly how to use it will crush your overwhelm and make you an AI pro.

Here’s My Quick and Dirty AI 101 Guide on What I Use, When I Use It and How I Use It:

Here is Everything I Currently Subscribe to:

Claude- $20 per month

Writing, MCP Network (connected to all of my apps like Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook), Coding (I play around with it- my friend Alan has been using it to build RE dashboards for me).

Google AI Studio- $24.99 per month

I get access to Gemini, Flow, Notebook LM, Opal, and more.

Gemini- Google’s LLM: I use this to upload large documents like loan documents, lease agreements, and more (it has 1m tokens meaning it can process a lot of information, whereas ChatGPT + Claude are at 200k). Deep research and image generation through Nano Banana are also great.

Flow- I’ve been playing around with creating videos for our leasing team at Peak. This thing may replace Hollywood.

Notebook LM- if you’re worried about privacy issues, use Notebook LM. It only looks at your data and doesn’t use it anywhere else. I use this to upload PCAs and other documents where I need to learn the details- I turn these into podcasts and listen on the plane.

Opal- their vibe coder. Don’t use it as much as Base44 but it’s a fun little thing to play around with.

ChatGPT - $20 per month

Deep Research- when I want to brainstorm on new revenue streams, how to monetize certain businesses, learning about new laws that affect my work as an Asset Manager, and more.

Projects- I store all projects I’m working on in here. It’s a great way to stay organized.

Custom GPTs- I’ve created a few of these that are specialized in a few things: NYC Rent Laws, Peak Data, T12 Analyzer, and more. What I like even more are the ones other people have created that I use all the time- for example, my prompt skills are good but not great. I use Custom GPT Prompt Creators that take my good prompts and turn them into expert prompts, which helps get me incredible output.

Canvas Mode- OpenAI’s coder. I ask it to create charts, mini-apps and more. Not as good as Perplexity Labs (see below) but it’s pretty cool what it can do. If you use ChatGPT (I’m sure you do), try Canvas mode today.

Voice Mode- I talk to Chat all the time, have it record notes, bounce ideas off of it, and even share my screen on my computer and ask it questions. I love this feature.

Perplexity- $20 per month

Perplexity has three tools + an AI Browser.

Search- my Google replacement. I use Google search 10% of the time and Perplexity search 90% of the time. Go check it out.

Deep Research- I don’t use this as much.

Labs- one of the coolest tools out there. Since Perplexity was built for web search, this thing does a deep dive into whatever you prompt it to and it creates dashboards, charts, mini-apps and more. I prompted it to search for multi-family value-add opportunities in the Top 5 Southeastern MSAs that fit our buy box. 15 deals with addresses, projected NOI, school ratings, crime ratings and more popped up in 10 minutes.

Comet- Perplexity’s AI browser. I’ve replaced Chrome with this. It looks exactly like Chrome, imports all of your data from Chrome but has an AI Assistant built into it. I pull up my Google Drive (which has thousands of docs in it) and I’ll ask the AI Assistant to find me a piece of information in a document so I don’t have to go find it. I also ask it to look at multiple docs and build an excel-like table for me, which it does with high accuracy.

I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do.

Genspark- $20 per month

My magic tool. I use it for pretty much everything.

Building investor decks, creating AM reports like lease trade outs reports, analyzing T12s and more. Tonight I fed it a P&L that was a pdf and it sent me back the entire thing in excel so I could edit it. Thanks for saving me hours of my time back.

Beauty of this tool (outside of it being able to do a lot) is that you can test out different LLMs within it like GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.1 (Claude). It lets you see outputs from different models at once, giving you the ability to pick the best one.

Base44- $100 per month

My main vibe coding tool. I’ve built landing pages (see the CRE AI Studio website), Asset Management Dashboards, Property Management tools, and more through this thing.

Some things were easier to build than others. I don’t want to sugarcoat it all. When you want to build more complex things, consult someone who knows what they’re doing (thanks Alan + Melvin).

Zapier- $20 per month

The most popular automation tool. I use Zapier to build out automations like automated email drafts, automatically sending me an alert via Slack 5 minutes before any event in my calendar (I’ve missed meetings in the past. Now I don’t) and so much more.

The possibilities are endless. I want to get so much better at building these things. Automations are really great because you basically set them up once and you’re good.

LindyAI- $50 per month

My newest tool. This is vibe-coding for AI Agents. Build an agent to do outbound sales (see my newsletter from last week), work on collections for you (EliseAI’s collection tool doesn’t integrate with Appfolio so I may have to build this one myself), or anything else.

Again, it’s easy to sound like I’ve built all of these things in a day or two, without stress and without issues.

Some of this stuff is not EASY! I spent months diving into automations and building dashboards only for them not to work, have bugs, and more. 

Knowing your limitations is key. Start slowly, get better each day, and try to find a tech developer to have on speed dial so you don’t go crazy.

As always, I’m here to help.

If you want to dive deeper into all of this, come join a community of other Commercial Real Estate Professionals at the CRE AI Studio where we teach you how to level up your AI skills.

AI is moving fast. My goal is to help the Real Estate Industry keep up.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Jonathan

Founder, The IndustrAI