How to find the right AI tool for your workflow in five steps

Glean's Work AI Index surveyed 6,000 office workers in the US, UK and Australia: 77% juggle several AI tools every week, and 33% use four or more. The same workers spend 6.4 hours a week steering and correcting what those tools produce. If you are asking how do I find the right AI tool for my workflow, start from the workflow and pick tools last. The five steps below run one weekly routine through our catalogue and put a price on it.

1. Write the workflow down

Pick something you do every week and list the steps. Our example: a 45-minute client call, a transcript, notes with next actions, a follow-up email and a short recap deck. That makes five steps, and two of them, the call and the email, need a person more than a model.

2. Give each step a task group

The transcript belongs to dictation, the notes and the email to writing, the deck to design: three of the ten groups in our AI catalogue. Our previous piece in this series sorted the types inside each group. Here you need one type per step: a bot that joins the call, a writing space next to your notes, a deck builder.

3. Check the handoff

You lose time between tools, every time you paste one output into the next input. Fireflies pushes call notes into a CRM on its own. Where two tools have no direct link, n8n chains them: a transcript arrives, a notes page appears, a deck draft starts. Check each handoff by hand for the first week, because an AI hallucination in the transcript travels on into the notes, the email and the deck.

4. Price the whole chain

Otter Pro at $8.33 a month on the annual plan, Notion Plus at $10 per seat and Gamma Plus at $12 add up to $30.33. The hosted n8n Starter plan costs €24, about $26.75 at the 29 October rate, so the glue costs almost as much as the three tools it connects. Run n8n on your own server and that line falls to zero, and you take on the upkeep.

“Adoption alone doesn't equal transformation”

— Dr Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, quoted by The Register, 10 June 2026 · theregister.com

5. Test the free plans against your real numbers

Otter's free plan gives 300 minutes a month but stops each conversation at 30 minutes, so our 45-minute call breaks it in the first week. Gamma's free plan gives 400 credits once, and they do not renew. A week of the real routine on free plans shows you which limit you hit first, and that limit is the thing you end up paying to remove.

The first piece in this series covered what is the best AI tool for my job, the second AI tools by job. The last one looks at the AI productivity tools of 2026 as a set of prices. Measure your chain against the 6.4 hours Glean's respondents lose each week: if a step adds checking time and saves none, drop the step before you add a tool.

Material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Prices are the plans in our catalogue as checked on 12 October 2026, and the euro conversion uses the 29 October rate. Survey figures come from Glean's Work AI Index.