As a B2B business, we’re planning our AI investments for 2026. The goal isn’t to cut corners or reduce headcount- in fact, we want to become more profitable so we can pay our existing employees more.
With major companies like Amazon and others cutting massive parts of their workforce in the name of efficiency, it’s clear AI can dramatically change the economics of a business. But we’re focused on using AI to augment, automate, and scale smarter, not replace people.
We’d love to hear from fellow entrepreneurs:
- Which AI tools have genuinely delivered ROI in a B2B setting?
- Are there platforms that are truly worth locking into next year’s budget?
- What tools helped you grow revenue without hurting your team?
We’re trying to separate hype from reality- your real-world experience would be super valuable.
We are Budgeting for AI in 2026- which tools are worth the hype?
byu/Aurora_Evana inEntrepreneur
Posted by Aurora_Evana
2 Comments
Absolutely. This year, thanks to AI especially, our engineering team was able to move atleast 2x faster, and we were able to do a lot of stuff that we used outsource to contractors on Upwork/Fiverr in house. I just pulled up our Mercury report and here are all the new tools we have been paying for this year
1. Cursor and Windsurf: Everyone in our team gets either Cursor or Windsurf paid for. I am personally a huge fan of Windsurf cascade agent. Its been able to make huge changes to our app on it own from simple prompts. We mostly just have to test the changes, review the code and just push it to deployment lately. Our team is moving definitely 2x faster with the same headcount. We use the Sonnet model almost unanimously inside our old!
2. Google Nano Banana & Veo 3: We used to hire contractors to make product images, photoshoots, videos for social media/ads etc. Google Nano Banana has mostly replaced all of that. It is great how it can take a product and change colors etc, and turn it into full blown photoshoots with models etc in seconds. And then you can just use it as a first frame in Veo 3 to make a full video/reel from it. Crazy!
3. Intercom Fin: We had an issue where whatever we do and document on our website, people kept asking some obvious questions on chat taking up valuable support bandwidth. Now Fin can auto resolve these questions instantly. Other questions get auto routed to real people so that people are not mad as well! !
4. Lovable & Bolt: Our marketing team now quickly spins up landing pages, lead gens using Lovable/Bolt instead of having to wait for engineering or external contractors. It’s not great complex apps for SAAS etc but it’s great for marketing landing pages, and simple stuff!
5. ChatGPT: Obvious, but everyone in our team gets ChatGPT to brainstorm, summarize reports etc
6. N8N: To automate lots of workflows inside our org.
Curious what others are using tho!
Not easy to find a good answer as far as the context where using AI is not clear.
IMHO if using it in Marketing&Sales is the goal, you may require a lot of time to the circle set up-action-monitoring. Otherwise you can instantly skyrocket your performance in case you have a development team using AI.
For the first scenario, I’d recommend ChatGPT and Grok which I believe are the best with strategic thinking. For AI support, Claude is absolutely the best!