The AI Tools I Use to Run Two Digital Product Businesses (2026 Guide)
Note: some of the links below are affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only point you to tools I use in my own business.
Open any "best AI tools" list and you get the same thing. Fifty tools. Forty browser tabs. A monthly bill that keeps creeping up while half of them sit unused.
That is not a tool problem. It is a system problem.
I run two businesses. Creator's MBA and HobbyScool. Between them I have courses, a membership, live events, a podcast, and two email lists. For years my tool list looked like everyone else's. Long.
In 2026, it got short. Not because I do less. Because AI now connects to the tools I already use, so the work happens in fewer places.
The shift most creators have not caught yet
Here is what changed. There is a standard called MCP. It lets an AI assistant talk straight to your other tools. Your email platform. Your design app. Your slides.
Before, you copied an answer out of a chatbot and pasted it into your email tool by hand. Now you can ask your AI to do the thing inside the tool, and it does it.
That changes which tools earn a spot on my list. The best AI tool is not the smartest one. It is the one that plugs into the work I already do.
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Think of it as a shared language that lets an AI assistant connect to another app and take action there. You ask in plain words. The AI does the work inside the tool you already pay for.
Before I hand you the list, one rule I live by. Tools sit inside a system, not the other way around. I run mine inside my Revenue Stack Method, my approach to building traffic and revenue in layers. The tools change over time. The system does not. Pick your system first. Then pick tools that serve it.
The hub: Claude
Claude is the brain of my business. Almost everything starts here. Email drafts, sales pages, course outlines, my faculty replies for the MBA courses I teach, and most of my strategy thinking.
Other AI tools give you a blank box and hope. What makes Claude different for me is two things: it holds context well, and I can teach it once and reuse that forever.
Claude Skills
This is the part that saves me the most time. I have built custom skills inside Claude for the work I repeat. A skill is a set of instructions Claude follows every time, so it writes in my voice and follows my rules without me re-explaining.
I have skills for my newsletters, my sales pages, my blog posts, even my Pinterest pins. I type one line. Claude knows the brand colors, the tone, and the format. The output comes back ready to use.
Claude Cowork
Cowork is for the bigger jobs. It is built for multi-step work, not one-off questions. I can hand it something that used to eat a whole morning and let it run through the steps while I do something else.
If you have ever wished you could delegate a task to a smart assistant without writing a five-page brief, this is that.
Claude Design
Design is where this gets fun. With Claude Design I can describe what I want and watch it build the thing on a canvas. Then I tweak it by chatting, not by hunting through menus.
It does not replace my whole design stack yet. But for fast, get-it-out-the-door assets, it is often where I start now.
The one that changed how I work: Kit and Kit MCP
Kit runs my email. Two lists, more than 40,000 subscribers, all my automations, my welcome sequences, my launch emails. It has been my email home for years.
What is new is the part that connects Kit to my AI. Kit now has an MCP. That means I can connect Claude straight to my Kit account.
So instead of logging in, clicking around, and copying text back and forth, I can ask. Pull my subscriber growth for the month. Draft a broadcast in my voice. Tell me which tags exist before I build a sequence. Set up the sequence itself.
It does the work inside Kit while I stay in one window. For someone who spends most of her week on email marketing, that is a real change in how the day feels.
"The best AI tool is not the smartest one. It is the one that plugs into the work you already do."
— Dr. Destini CoppOne honest note. You still review everything before it sends. AI is fast, and fast plus your email list is a place to stay careful. I treat its drafts as a strong first pass, not a final send.
If turning your email list into steady revenue is the goal, that is the whole focus of my Newsletter Profit Club.
Research and thinking: NotebookLM
NotebookLM is my research partner, and it is free with a Google account. The thing that sets it apart is grounding. You upload your own sources, and its answers stay tied to those documents.
So when I am building a course or a content series, I drop in my research, transcripts, and notes. Then I ask questions and get answers I can trust, because they come from my material, not from the open internet.
How I use it:
- Turn a pile of research into a clean course outline
- Pull the key themes out of long transcripts and interviews
- Build study guides and reference docs for students
- Organize messy ideas into a structure I can actually write from
Create and design: Gamma
For a long time my design work lived in a few different tools. Now most of it runs through Gamma. You give it your topic and it builds something that already looks good, so I am editing instead of starting from a blank page.
How I use it:
- Decks for workshops, webinars, and speaker talks
- Images for our ads
- Graphics for our events
Gamma also has its own MCP, which fits the theme of this whole guide. The tools that connect to my AI keep earning their place. The ones that do not, fall off the list.
Audio and video: Descript
Editing my podcast used to take hours. With Descript, it takes a fraction of that. You edit audio and video by editing the transcript, like a Word doc. Delete a sentence in the text, and it disappears from the recording.
Its AI tools remove filler words, clean up the sound, and help me cut clips for social. Descript is also MCP-connected, so it sits right inside the way I work now.
How I use it:
- Edit full podcast episodes fast
- Clean up course videos without fancy gear
- Pull short clips for social from a long recording
- Get transcripts I can hand to Claude or NotebookLM for repurposing
The real lesson: fewer tools, wired to your AI
If you take one thing from this, let it be this. You do not need more AI tools. You need fewer tools, connected to one AI you trust.
The long lists feel productive. They are the opposite. Every new tool is another login, another bill, and another thing to learn. Most of them never get used.
So here is the order I would follow. Pick one hub. For me that is Claude. Move your writing, planning, and strategy into it. Once that feels normal, connect your email platform through MCP. Then add a design tool, a slide tool, and an audio tool only as you need them.
The system comes first. The tools serve the system. That is the whole shift, and it is why my list got shorter while my output went up.
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Fewer than most lists tell you. I run two businesses on Claude as my main hub, Kit for email (connected to Claude through MCP), NotebookLM for research, Gamma for slides and design, and Descript for audio and video. The point is not the count. It is picking tools that connect to your AI so the work happens in one place.
MCP is a standard that lets an AI assistant talk directly to another tool. Kit's MCP connects an assistant like Claude to your Kit account. You can ask it to pull your subscriber growth, draft a broadcast, check which tags exist, or set up a sequence, all in plain language. You still review everything before it sends.
For my business, mostly yes now. I moved my decks, ad images, and event graphics into Gamma, and I lean on Claude Design for fast, build-from-a-description work. You may keep a dedicated design tool if your brand work is heavy. I found I reached for it less and less, so I stopped paying for it.
Yes. NotebookLM is free with a Google account. You upload your own sources, like research, transcripts, or course notes, and it answers questions tied to those documents. That grounding is why I trust it for content work.
Start with one hub. For me that is Claude. Move your writing, planning, and strategy into it first. Once that feels normal, connect your email platform through MCP. Adding tools before you have a system is how the bill creeps up and nothing gets used.
