Industry Pros Share Most-Used AI Tools: Trey Courtney’s Top 5

July 25, 2025 by guest author, Antonia Hamberger

Asking industry professionals about their favorite AI tools reveals just how fragmented the current AI landscape is. Beyond the major LLMs and their chatbots, preferences seem to vary widely, with people leaning toward niche tools tailored to specific tasks.

For example, at retail experience company Mood Media, text-to-speech generation has become a particularly valuable use case. The company uses Elevenlabs not just for internal and external communications, but also as a customer-facing tool. It’s been integrated into a product called AI Messaging Co-Pilot, which enables clients to generate custom audio messages in seconds.

Trey Courtney, Mood Media’s Global Chief Product & Partnerships Officer, shared some of his go-to AI tools – both for personal productivity and organizational use. His list few lesser-known gems:

• Claude.ai – “My overall favorite LLM for day-to-day tasks like drafting documents or helping with simple coding.”
• Trupeer.ai – “Our team uses this to quickly create video tutorials and guides for both internal and external audiences.”
• Elevenlabs – “Beyond using it for voice-overs, we built AI Messaging Co-Pilot with it to let customers create in-store audio messages in seconds.”
• Zapier – “A long-time favorite of mine. The addition of AI features has made it even more powerful for building automations without needing to write code.”
• The Bricks – “A smart tool for working with spreadsheets. It helps analyze dense datasets and extract insights quickly.”

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the most valued AI tools are those that solve specific, often repetitive problems – typically by making unavoidable tasks faster or easier. Others are integrated into applications that are already part of existing workflows.

To hear Trey speak about other strategic topics like retail media and managed services, watch this interview Dave Haynes did last December: