2025 felt like the year AI stopped being an experiment and quietly became part of everyone’s daily workflow.
Between automations, smarter assistants, and AI-powered everything, a lot of us rebuilt parts of our stack without even realizing it. Some tools just clicked and became irreplaceable.
Curious to hear what that looked like for others- looking back at 2025, what new tools have become must-haves in your stack this year?
Looking back at 2025, what new tools have become must-haves in your stack?
byu/Aurora_Evana inEntrepreneur
Posted by Aurora_Evana
9 Comments
Buffer for social media. vcita for CRM, payment, and outreach. [Beautiful.ai](http://Beautiful.ai) for presentations.
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. N8N: To automate lots of workflows inside our org.
4. 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! !
5. 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!
6. ChatGPT: Obvious, but everyone in our team gets ChatGPT to brainstorm, summarize reports etc
Curious what others are using tho!
Looking back, the biggest mindset shift in 2025 was realizing how fast nice to have tools became absolutely core. AI just blended into everything, not flashy, just quietly essential. Same with areas people used to ignore like chargeback management. It stopped being something you deal with later and became part of the operational stack. Adding Chargeflow wasn’t some big transformation moment, it just fit naturally into that new reality where automation runs the boring parts so teams can focus on building.
Claude for long form docs handles nuance better than most.
honestly what hit me this year wasn’t the AI itself but realizing i was using 3 different tools when 1 would do. consolidated down to cursor + perplexity for research & claude for docs. the real shift was automation becoming default, not optional – if you’re manually doing something twice you’re already behind. also funny how everyone talks about AI but nobody mentions the boring stuff that actually saves time like decent project mgmt tools or proper analytics. sometimes the “must-have” is just getting your basics right first.
claude and cursor became tools i can’t work without this year. i use claude’s projects feature to keep my brand voice consistent across all customer emails and sales docs. takes me about 4 hours a week now instead of 12. cursor handles the coding side and saves me from context switching. if budget’s tight, perplexity does decent research but you can’t have real conversations with it. i run a small b2b service and these two just made my days manageable again.
– Claude code for almost everything I do (code, content,…)
– chatGPT to brainstorm
– chatSEO for SEO strategy
– NanoBanana for images
I have to say that some design tools and content generation tools are very frequently used in our work at present.
Superhuman