Best AI tool for your job: six professions mapped to our catalogue

Type "what is the best AI tool for my job" into a search bar and you expect one name back. Software sorts by task. A marketer and a sales manager both sit through a client call on Tuesday, and both need the transcript afterwards. Our catalogue lists AI tools by job in ten task groups, from video to code, so we took six professions and mapped them onto those groups, with each tool's entry price as we checked it on 12 October.

Who pays decides where you start

Epoch AI and Ipsos asked 1,103 employed Americans in July which AI service they use for work and who pays for it. Among the 469 who had used AI for work in the previous week, tech jobs stand apart:

“67% of AI-using workers in computer, engineering, and science jobs use employer-provided AI”

— Amreeta Das and Caroline Falkman Olsson, Epoch AI, 14 August 2026, https://epoch.ai/data-insights/employer-provided-ai-by-occupation

In sales and office jobs 59% of AI users sit on a free plan, and in service jobs 57%. For most people asking the question, the first tool is a $0 plan of something narrow. Thirteen of the fifteen tools below have one.

Six professions, fifteen tools

• Marketing: writing, images and ad video. Jasper starts at $59 a month on the annual plan, Ideogram at $20 and keeps text inside an image readable, TopView at $29 builds an ad clip from a product listing.
• Software development: code. Cursor starts at $8 a month after its 12 October repricing, and Devin, which takes a ticket and returns a pull request, costs $20 per seat.
• Management and sales: transcripts. Otter is $8.33 a month billed annually, Fireflies $10 per seat and drops the call into your CRM, PLAUD sells a card-sized recorder with a $17.99 plan.
• Design and presentations: Figma at $12 per seat, Canva at $18, Gamma at $12 for decks that live as a link.
• Research and analysis: Perplexity at $20, which shows where each answer came from, and Genspark at $24.99.
• Video and audio content: ElevenLabs voice-over from $6 and Descript, which edits video by editing the transcript, from $24.

The two tools with no free plan are both marketing tools. Jasper's $59 is the highest entry price in our writing group, where QuillBot starts at $4.17. In marketing you pay for the specialist tool on day one and test the general ones for free.

Developers sit at the other end. Team plans in our code group bill per seat: Cursor from $30, Replit at $40, Lovable at $50, and Devin, the AI agent in the group, charges per seat from its first paid plan. Those prices assume a company card, which matches the 67% in Epoch's data.

What this list leaves out

We do not score tools out of ten, because we have not run our own benchmarks. Each task page says at the top how it is ordered. If most of your week is one task, that task's page answers the question better than any list of professions. The cheapest paid plan in each of the ten groups adds up to $102.59 a month for one seat, as we worked out on 26 October. For a tour of how the catalogue itself works, start with our piece from 13 October.

Later pieces in this series take on how do I find the right AI tool for my workflow when one job spans five tasks, and what the AI productivity tools of 2026 cost once the free tier runs out. Before you subscribe to anything, count which task fills most of your week; that count picks the page to open better than the job title does.

None of this should be read as personalised investment advice. Prices are the entry plans in our catalogue as checked on 12 October 2026 and can change; Cursor's reflect its new tiers from the same day. Survey figures come from Epoch AI and Ipsos.