AI Investors Don’t Use Most AI Tools. Here Are the Ones They Do Use
Despite the hype surrounding AI tools, many investors stick to a small handful they find genuinely useful.
We asked AI investors which products they use day to day, and the list was shorter than the hype would suggest.
Escaping ‘Meeting Hell’
Transcription products were around long before chatbots took off, and it is no wonder they are still a mainstay for investors.
“One tool I can’t live without is Granola for note-taking,” said Payton Dobbs, a partner at Hoxton Ventures.
Founded in 2023, Granola plays in the same space as companies like Otter, which has been around for about a decade and boasts more than 25 million users.
Research Helpers and ‘Thought Partners’
Large language models like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are now ubiquitous across the industry.
That is no different for investors — but what’s revealing is how deliberately they describe using them.
“We use LLMs and associated tools and agents for doing deep research, alongside simple AI agents for automating tasks like web scraping and updates,” said Mikael Johnsson, co-founder of Oxx.
Experimenting with AI Agents
Beyond chatbots and research assistants, some investors are starting — cautiously — to experiment with AI agents.
“I’m still learning here myself, but I’ve started playing with Lua AI, an agentic platform to build a few agents that actually plug into my work,” said Novitske.
Even so, expectations remain measured, with research firm Gartner estimating that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to unclear value and rising costs.
Email Still Resists Automation
Despite companies’ best efforts, email remains an area where AI tools struggle to deliver.
“I’ve played around with email AI agents like Fyxer, Superhuman and Shortwave, but never really found one I’m happy with,” said Dobbs.
That hesitation fits a broader pattern, with investors still mostly trusting AI to support their work in a limited way — summarizing, organizing, or scanning — rather than speaking or acting for them.
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