A lot of the skill in using AI right now is just picking the right tool for the job. Frontier labs ship new models every few months. SaaS tools layer on top. Independent developers put wild things on GitHub (OpenClaw being a recent popular!).

How to keep up with them?

In traditional CPG, a lot of us have mostly lived in the Microsoft family for professional work. If your company hasn’t enabled anything beyond Copilot, that’s your whole world. And it’s easy to start feeling left out if copilot and ChatGPT are the only things you’ve tried.

I don’t have a clever answer for keeping up. “Try it yourself” is the only thing that’s worked for me. Once you actually touch a tool, you catch up on the context fast. When something confuses you, ask the chatbots, I mean, ask many of them — you’ll learn quicker than from any courses.

To give everyone an idea, here’s where I’ve landed on popular tools as of April 2026:

(As of now, I have Google AI Pro, Perplexity Pro, and Claude Pro subscriptions. I get ChatGPT Plus when I need it too)

QUICK ANSWERS, everyday life: Google AI mode, Google Maps’ Ask Maps, and Perplexity.

SCHEDULED TASKS: moved from OpenClaw to Perplexity. OpenClaw earlier this year taught me a lot about how agents actually work — worth the time even if you don’t stay on it.

**SCIENTIST WORKFLOWS (documents, decks): Claude, still. I like how Claude can coordinate different agents, skills and MCPs on one task. Although currently we are still in the Opus 4.6 nerf discourse and the mixed reception of 4.7.

CODING: Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini — I rotate depending on the task. Or use two of them to cross-check.

LEARNING: NotebookLM is genuinely amazing. Reading and extracting methods from papers has never been faster. I also use Gemini’s Nano Banana for infographics when I need one.

None of this is a hard recommendation. It’s a snapshot. Yours can look different, depending on your tasks and resources. Mine changes all the time as well.

What’s in your stack right now? Do you have a specific tool that you liked, especially for the the fellow sensory scientists? Put it in the comment to let everybody know!

#BitesizeAI