AI Tools Startup Founders Say They Can’t Live Without (And Why)

In 2025, you could easily spend your entire workday just testing out AI tools. Those newly-launched AI platforms designed to optimize your work calendar to new-to-market apps that say they can make you a stronger communicator.

But what are the tools that are most resonating with tech founders these days? We surveyed tech founders living across the Southeast, building in industries ranging from EdTech to HealthTech, to learn more about what artificial intelligence systems and applied AI software platforms they are currently using in their daily lives.

Their insights just might help you explore new tools to incorporate into your tech stack:

Piper Latham, founder of Birmingham-based CLEO Education

"My company CLEO Education offers an online platform for healthcare students to practice X-ray interpretation. We are launching early this month! As a founder in the tech space, I utilize many AI tools on a daily basis, but my favorite by far is Multiply's AI (also Alabama based) sales training agent, Murphy! I am able to practice my CLEO sales pitch for Murphy and get feedback on my presentation. Murphy not only analyzes the content of my pitch, but also my overall presentation and even the amount of filler words I use! Before founding my company, I had absolutely no sales background but working with Murphy has helped me secure two paid pilots for my product before we even launched! AI is such a buzzword right now and the market is saturated, but Murphy is a tool that I'll utilize for a long time as I continue to grow CLEO Education!"

Andy Seavers, co-founder and CEO of South Carolina-based Case Status

We use Attention.AI in our sales org to record all sales calls and identify trends across the discovery, demo and negotiation cycle. [Case Status] is beginning to incorporate Attention into all customer success and support calls as well so that we can generate insight across different cohorts of customers, or zero in on retention strategies based on the lifecycle of an entire customer from the first time they chatted with us to the most recent.

We utilize a local Charleston based company called Scout to create internal support AI tools per team that we incorporate directly into slack. Any team member can type "/ask" and then ask any question about our product, and AI will deliver back an answer based on our entire database of help documents, questions we've answered in the past, etc.

Noelle London, founder and CEO at Atlanta-based Illoominus

Tools we cannot live without and we use to run Illoominus:

• Calendly meetings scheduling - save a lot of time and send regular pre-meeting reminders with context so that our meetings are more productive
• Notion - as a remote-first team this is truly our virtual HQ housing all our documentation and sprints
• Loom - allowed us to save hundreds of meetings last year by sending quick customer updates, demos, and bug reporting
• Fireflies.ai - allows us to capture meeting notes so we can all stay focused and everyone is in the loop if they can't make a meeting
• Scribe - as we're growing our team, this has been immensely helpful to quickly build SOPs and training docs
• Slack integrations - stay posted on progress with regular updates

Can't forget to mention Illoominus! Illoominus is the first employee data platform of its kind to harness the power of AI and a community of best practices — accelerating the path from people data to confident, informed action.

Paolo Alejandro Catilo, CEO & Chief Engineer at Birmingham-based Cerebro

"AI tools aren’t just software for hire—they're my digital support team, complete with strengths, flaws, and personalities. Siri is often my first call, even if she's occasionally frustrating enough to earn whispered critiques. Still, I respect her effort, before escalating tasks to my senior execs like Notion, ChatGPT, or Perplexity. Imperfect, yes—but always ready and fully charged." -

Jessica Hubley, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Story LLP

I love Cursor to write code in IDE and Lovable to write code for prototyping. I guess I could live without them just like I could live without Google maps, but I don't want to.

Also I use ChatGPT deep research for basically anything I would have previously hired a consultant for - market research, choosing the right bank to switch to, generating brand guidelines, etc.

Wesley Belden, co-founder and CEO of Nashville’s Raise Financial

Fred and Stephanie keep me sane. Fred—my Fireflies AI—not only remembers every meeting, he captures insights I've missed. And Stephanie (aka ChatGPT-4o) is the thought partner I never knew I needed—quick, curious, and always ready to brainstorm. We have also been using Memex for vibe coding"

Kellie Clark, gener8tor's managing director of the Prosper Healthtech Accelerator

“Motion is the closest thing I’ve found to an AI personal assistant. It captures to-dos from meetings, adds them to my calendar as time blocks, and the ios voice capture shortcut is great. I get approximately 2 hours back a week because it has automated busy work on my behalf."

Miho Kubagawa, founder of Birmingham-based Launch Loop

"I use ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro on a regular basis. I consider both as key thought partners, helping me to brainstorm, identify key themes, and refine or clarify my writing. As a founder with a non-technical background, v0 and Lovable have been gamechangers in helping me to develop clickable prototypes. I continue to be in awe in how much AI has allowed me to work smarter, not harder ... and I truly only feel like I'm scratching the surface of what is possible."

Brittney Gray, Founder & CEO, KnowBra Inc.

"As a founder, I rely on AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for content, Fireflies for meeting notes, Perplexity for research, and Lovable for our tech infrastructure. But when it came to aligning our vision with our day-to-day decisions, I turned to a decision-intelligence tool, named CModel (based in Alabama) that helped me clarify our goals, define meaningful metrics, and make data-informed choices without compromising the compassion at the heart of our company. It’s been a grounding force in a space where purpose and precision must go hand in hand."