What exists beyond the chat window — what it can do, and what it costs
"Write me a post about our new savings account." → you get a paragraph of text to copy-paste, format and finish yourself.
"Here's the brief and last year's campaign folder — build the deck, the landing page and a voiced video draft." → you get finished files to review.
Often it's the same AI underneath. What changed is the tools around it — and this talk is a guided tour of those tools, price tags included.
Chatbot vs agent, the loop, and why the model forgets — in five slides.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — their full toolboxes, plan by plan.
A week of real tasks — decks, podcasts, pages, research.
Video, voice, avatars, images, decks, automation — the deep dive.
What agents actually did in the real world — good and bad.
Excel, PowerPoint & co. — plugins, connectors and MCP.
Prices travel with the tools — every tool comes with its price tag, as we go.
Flat $/month, capped by usage limits. The labs: free → ~$20 → $100–200. Simple, predictable.
Buy a bucket; each image/clip/minute burns some. Most creative tools. Hardest to budget — retries burn credits too.
$/user/month for teams — adds admin controls, SSO, "no training on your data". Usually ~$20–40/seat.
Metered pay-per-use for building software on top. No cap; scales with usage.
And the trap to remember: free tier ≠ free for commercial use. More on that in "the fine print". All prices in this deck: July 2026 snapshot — verify before quoting.
You ask → it tells you what to do → you open the files, do the steps, paste results back… and repeat.
You ask → it does the work itself — reads the files, takes the steps, checks the result → you review at the end.
Often it's the same model underneath. The difference is everything wrapped around it — and every tool in this talk is some flavour of that wrapping.
Every agent product in this deck — Cowork, Codex, agent mode, all of them — is this loop in a different costume.
Keep this in mind — it explains why tools plug into your files, your brand kit, your inbox: they're the model's notes & tattoos.
Don't memorise these — each comes back with its own slide. This is just your map.
Summaries, first drafts, comparisons, cited reports.
Ask questions across a whole folder, inbox or wiki.
Genuine decks, spreadsheets, pages, audio — not just text.
Sort, rename, triage, fill in — the repetitive stuff.
A landing page or small tool without an IT ticket.
You review & approve. A power tool, not a replacement.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google. The same $20 entry fee — three very different toolboxes.
| Maker | Flagship lineup (July 2026) | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Claude Fable 5 · Opus 5 · Sonnet 5 · Haiku 4.5 | coding, agents, long context |
| OpenAI | GPT‑5.6 — Sol · Terra · Luna | general reasoning, Codex |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash · 3.5 Flash‑Lite (3.5 Pro still unreleased) | multimodal, large context |
The same tiers repeat everywhere: large (smartest, priciest) · medium (the sweet spot) · small (fast & cheap) — plus a frontier tier on top lately. It reshuffles every few months — treat any list as a snapshot. For today, the products matter more than the model names —
The chat assistant — web, desktop, mobile. Drafting, analysis, files, web search.
The coding agent, for developers — terminal & IDE.
The agent for everyone else — point it at a folder of files. Next slide.
Prompt → decks, pages & visuals in your brand. Two slides on.
A browser extension that reads pages, clicks and fills forms with you.
Side panel inside Excel, PowerPoint, Word & Outlook — see "plugging it in".
One subscription, not six products: everything here is included from Pro at ~$20/mo (free tier = chat only). Prices as of July 2026.
Anthropic's agent for developers: lives in the terminal or editor, reads a whole codebase, writes & runs code, fixes its own mistakes. Included from Pro (~$20/mo).
OpenAI's equivalent, on GPT‑5.6 — terminal, IDE and a cloud version that works on tasks while you're away. Bundled into ChatGPT plans (full access from Plus, ~$20/mo).
Why you should care even if you never code: these transformed programming first — Anthropic says over 80% of its own production code is now written by Claude. Then someone asked: what if we removed the code part? →
Anthropic saw developers using its coding agent for non-coding work — organising files, planning, reports — so it removed the terminal. Cowork was built in under two weeks, mostly by Claude Code itself.
The headline feature: import your company's design system & brand files, and everything it makes comes out in your visual identity — not generic AI-style slides.
The chat assistant — Free · Go ~$8 · Plus ~$20 · Pro $100–200/mo.
The coding agent — bundled in; full access from Plus.
Plans & executes multi-step tasks — browses, runs code, hands back real decks & spreadsheets.
Image generation & editing in-chat — 2K output, consistent characters across a batch.
A reusable, pre-configured ChatGPT for one job ("our tone-of-voice editor") — shareable with the team.
Free & Go now show ads. And the famous Sora video app? Gone — story in a moment.
Same ladder as Claude: ~$20/mo (Plus) is where the real toolbox unlocks. Prices as of July 2026.
(ex-NotebookLM, renamed July 2026.) Upload your documents → cited answers from only those sources — and Audio Overviews: your PDFs as a two-host podcast. Core features free.
The chat assistant — Free · AI Plus ~$5 · AI Pro ~$20 · Ultra $100–200/mo.
Text-to-video (with synced dialogue) + a filmmaking front-end. The mainstream AI-video product — paid in credits via the plans (Pro ≈ 1,000/mo).
Built into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet — now bundled in base plans (from ~$14/user/mo), no separate add-on.
Gemini Notebook is the classic first "wow": drop a 40-page report in, get a podcast out — on the free tier. Prices as of July 2026.
| Claude Pro · $20 | ChatGPT Plus · $20 | Google AI Pro · $20 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent that does work | Cowork (your files) | Agent mode | — |
| Visuals & decks | Claude Design | Images 2.0 | image gen |
| Office / docs integration | Excel · PowerPoint · Word | connectors + add-ins | Gmail · Docs · Sheets |
| Digest documents | projects | Deep Research | Gemini Notebook + podcast |
| AI video | — | — (Sora gone) | Flow · ~1,000 credits |
| Coding agent | Claude Code | Codex | Antigravity · Jules |
Honest advice: start with the ecosystem you already live in — and use the free tiers to find out which one that is. July 2026 snapshot.
| Tier | Claude | ChatGPT | Google AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | chat, limited | chat, limited (+ ads) | chat + Notebook basics |
| Entry | Pro ~$20 | Go ~$8 · Plus ~$20 | Plus ~$5 · Pro ~$20 |
| Power | Max ~$100 / $200 | Pro ~$100 / $200 | Ultra ~$100 / $200 |
| Team | ~$20–25/seat | Business ~$20–25/seat | Workspace ~$14–22/user |
Higher tiers buy more usage & early access — not a different product. The team tiers are where admin controls, SSO and "no training on your data" live — for work accounts, that's the row that matters. Prices July 2026 — they change often.
OpenAI's video app, shut down Mar 2026 — reported costs of $1M–15M/day vs ~$2M lifetime revenue
OpenAI's AI browser, launched Oct 2025 — retiring 9 Aug 2026
announced for June 2026 — still unreleased, delayed over coding performance
renamed Gemini Notebook, July 2026 — same product, new name
rebranded to Magnific, Apr 2026 — your subscription moved with it
2023's most-hyped AI deck tool — dead Apr 2025, pivoted away
Two lessons: verify before quoting anything AI-related older than a quarter — and never build a process on one tool without a fallback.
One ordinary week of tasks — running example: a marketing person. Every task translates to other jobs.
"Results CSV + last quarter's deck → this quarter's 12-slide review." (Cowork / agent mode)
"This 40-page study → a 10-min podcast for the commute." (Gemini Notebook)
"One key visual → every social format, on brand." (Canva)
"A landing page for the promo — today, without a ticket." (Claude Design / Lovable)
"Competitors' pricing → a cited comparison table." (Perplexity / deep research)
"This script in three languages — same voice." (ElevenLabs)
None of this is futuristic — every tile is a tool from the last section doing its day job. Each returns in detail in a minute.
Notice what it didn't do: invent the missing numbers. And notice your role — you moved from making the deck to directing & reviewing it.
These reports look authoritative and still contain errors. Treat them as a well-organised starting point with a reading list — never a finished document you forward.
An internal brainstorm needs a skim. Anything public, legal or financial needs a real review. The tool drafts fast precisely so that you can afford to review well.
Ten categories, one slide each: what it does · who leads · a real use case · the price. Tool names churn — the categories stay.
Names churn; the four jobs are stable. One leader per box — July 2026. The cheat sheet at the end of the section holds the full table.
The leader (~$500M annual run-rate, June 2026). Chat → a real, hosted site with forms & a database. Free · Pro ~$25 · Business ~$50/mo, credit-based.
The design-quality pick — polished pages from a prompt or a Figma file. Free · Premium ~$20/mo.
Bolt.new (friendliest free tier) · Replit (real backends, ~$20) · Figma Make (inside Figma seats).
Prices ~July 2026, credit-based — verify before budgeting.
The leader. Best fidelity, the only one with synced dialogue. Via Google plans: ~$20/mo ≈ 1,000 credits (≈ 10 top-quality clips).
The aggregator — 15+ models under one subscription, preset cinematic camera moves. Tiers ~$15 / $39 / $99/mo.
The editor's tool — generation + a real editing suite. $15 / $35 / $95/mo. Standard ≈ 4–6 finished 10-sec clips/mo.
| Kling | best value, strongest motion — from ~$7/mo | Chinese vendor — check data policies |
| Pika | playful effects for social — from ~$10/mo | scroll-stoppers, not polish |
| Luma | smooth, dreamlike motion — from ~$30/mo | mood loops & abstract brand visuals |
Reality check: 5–10-second shots, credits burn on discarded takes too. Use for b-roll, social clips, animating an approved still. Prices ~July 2026.
Veo & Runway imagine footage — you can't fully control the result. HyperFrames is a factory: same template, new data, a thousand on-brand videos. Ask a technical colleague to set it up once.
Script → presenter in 160+ languages. Training & explainers you re-render, not re-shoot, when things change. Free 10 min/mo · Starter $29 · Creator $89/mo.
Its party trick: video translation with lip-sync — the original speaker appears to speak another language, mouth matched. Free 3 videos · from ~$29/mo.
D-ID is the budget option (~$16/mo): animates a still photo into a talking head. Rule of thumb: Synthesia for training, HeyGen for marketing & localisation. Prices July 2026.
Free: 10 min/mo — no commercial licence, watermarked, attribution required. Starter ~$5/mo: commercial licence + instant voice cloning. Creator ~$22 (adds professional cloning) · Pro ~$99/mo. The cheapest professional "wow" in this deck.
Prices July 2026 — credit-based, shared across speech, dubbing & effects.
Describe a song → finished track with vocals. Pro ~$10/mo incl. commercial rights — but training data is in litigation: legal check before paid media.
Settled with the labels; rebuilding as a licensed "walled garden" — downloads currently disabled. A tool that can't export isn't a tool yet.
Licensed catalogue (Merlin/Kobalt, royalties paid) — the legally safest AI music route.
It transcribes your recording; delete a sentence in the text and it's cut from the video. One-click "um" removal, studio-sound cleanup. ~$16–24/mo — the highest ROI per hour of learning in this entire deck.
Prices ~July 2026.
The daily driver. AI inside the tool teams already use — layouts, image gen, magic resize, brand kit enforced. Free tier genuinely usable · Pro ~$12–18/mo.
The one that gets text inside images right — posters, banners, packaging with real copy. From ~$8/mo, commercial use on paid tiers.
The one legal signs off: trained on licensed content, enterprise indemnification. In Photoshop too. From ~$10/mo.
Highest aesthetic ceiling — concepts & mood boards. $10–120/mo, no free tier — and cheaper tiers are public: never paste unreleased work.
Footnote: Freepik is now Magnific (Apr 2026) — stock + AI + a best-in-class upscaler, from ~€6/mo. Prices ~July 2026.
The leader. Topic or document in → designed deck out; exports to PowerPoint, publishes as a website. Free to try · paid ~$10–25/mo.
Already included if you have Canva — better brand control, good presenter mode.
"Smart slides" that keep layouts tidy — but $40/user/mo, no free tier. Hard to justify vs the other two.
Also in this race: Claude Design (slide 14) and ChatGPT's agent mode. And Tome — 2023's most-hyped deck tool — is dead: the churn lesson, again. Prices ~July 2026.
The old category king — revenue roughly halved. Survives on brand-voice consistency across big teams. ~$39–69/mo.
Left the category — pivoted to sales automation. Agents from ~$249/mo. The pivot tells the story.
The governance play: flags copy that breaks brand or compliance rules before human review. ~$39/user · enterprise.
AI over your own wiki — "summarise every campaign retro mentioning X." Now needs Business, ~$20/user/mo.
The takeaway: for writing itself, the $20 general assistant is now as good. Pay for these only for governance at scale. Prices ~July 2026.
An AI browser acting on pages you're logged into is a documented prompt-injection risk — a hidden instruction on a page can steer it. Keep agentic browsers away from sensitive logged-in systems.
Prices ~July 2026.
The leader — 8,000+ apps; describe the automation in plain English. Free 100 tasks/mo · from ~$30/mo.
Visual drag-and-drop canvas, ~3–5× cheaper per operation (~$10–34/mo, per workspace). Steeper curve.
Open-source, self-hostable — the answer when data must not leave your own infrastructure. Free to self-host.
Relay: built-in human approval steps — AI drafts, pauses for sign-off. Lindy: "AI employees" for a whole inbox. From ~$19–20/mo.
The pattern to copy: the pause in the middle — AI drafts, a human signs, then the machines fan out. Prices ~July 2026.
Free tier ≠ commercial use. ElevenLabs, Suno, Ideogram: the commercial licence starts at the first paid tier.
Cheap tiers are often public by default — Midjourney below Pro shows your prompts & images to everyone. No unreleased work.
Where did the training data come from? Firefly & ElevenLabs Music are licensed — the defensible picks. Others are in litigation.
Credit pricing is slippery — retries burn credits. Start on fixed plans, auto-top-up off.
And once more: every price in this deck is a July 2026 snapshot. Check the vendor's page before you commit a budget.
| Job | Leader | Also look at | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everyday assistant + agent | Claude · ChatGPT · Gemini | — | free → ~$20/mo |
| Page or app from a prompt | Lovable | v0, Bolt, Replit | free → ~$25/mo |
| Generated video | Veo + Flow | Higgsfield, Runway | ~$15–20/mo |
| Templated / data video | HyperFrames | — | free (open source) |
| Avatar presenter | Synthesia | HeyGen, D-ID | free → $29/mo |
| Voice & dubbing | ElevenLabs | — | ~$5/mo (commercial) |
| Music | ElevenLabs Music (safest) | Suno (check legal) | ~$10/mo |
| Images & design | Canva | Ideogram, Firefly, Midjourney | free → ~$12/mo |
| Decks | Gamma | Claude Design, Canva | free → ~$10/mo |
| Cited research | Perplexity | lab deep-research modes | free → $20/mo |
| Automation | Zapier | Make, n8n, Relay | free → ~$30/mo |
Screenshot this one. Names churn; categories are stable — this is how you re-orient in six months. July 2026.
True, documented, recent — what agents actually did out in the world. Good and bad.
The raw model was both at once. What turned it from a pushover into a business? Tools and guardrails — the thesis of this entire deck.
Imperial College London spent a decade on how superbugs acquire resistance. Google's AI co-scientist, given the same question, ranked the correct — unpublished — answer first in two days.
The hardest finance exam — essays included. Models passed a full mock in minutes (best ~79%). Humans train ~300 hours per level.
Official IMO gold medal, certified by the organisers — 5 of 6 problems, standard conditions. Only ~1 in 10 human contestants got gold.
The reframe: the exam-shaped part of professional work — recall, procedure, structured answers — is now cheap. Judgment, accountability, and knowing what to ask are not.
Google's Big Sleep agent found a flaw in software on billions of devices — one only attackers knew — and it was patched before they could strike. A first.
Anthropic disclosed the first largely AI-orchestrated espionage campaign: a jailbroken coding agent ran ~80–90% of the attack autonomously (Nov 2025).
It's the same loop from slide 6 doing both jobs. Which one it does is decided by the humans and guardrails around it — which is why the fine-print slides in this deck aren't decoration.
AI raised the floor — what a small team can produce. It hasn't raised the ceiling. Craft, taste and a real idea still win.
A chat window is a silo. The real power arrives when AI reaches Excel, PowerPoint, mail and your drives — safely.
One thread, four apps — the side panel shares a single conversation across all four.
At work, admins can block add-ins — expect this to start with a conversation with IT.
Claude & ChatGPT both produce genuine .pptx / .xlsx / .docx in the chat: describe it, upload source data, download an editable file — not text to reformat.
Add-ins (last slide) work inside a file you already have. Chat produces a new file. Editing the Q2 model → add-in. First draft of the deck → chat.
For many people this is the biggest single upgrade in this talk — and it needs nothing installed. Included from the ~$20 tiers.
Link to Drive, Gmail, SharePoint, Slack… — it searches your actual documents, not just what you paste.
Official OpenAI add-in: narrates each step, cites cells, asks before writing. Built for financial workflows.
Third-party tools inside the conversation — design in Canva, search hotels — without leaving the chat.
⚠ Region check: several consumer-tier features have been limited in the EEA/UK; business tiers get broader access. Verify on your tier, in your region, before promising a demo.
Agent mode in Word, Excel & PowerPoint — works on the document itself. ~$21–30/user/mo on top of M365. Fun fact: the Office agents run on Anthropic's models.
Now bundled into base plans (from ~$14/user) — Gmail, Docs, Meet. Star feature: =AI("prompt", A2) in Sheets — an AI prompt as a formula, filled down 1,000 rows.
The trade-off vs the add-ins: built-ins are the path of least resistance (and often the easiest compliance story) — the dedicated tools are usually better at the work itself. Prices July 2026.
The safety rule: plug in only the actions you need. The AI can only misuse what you've connected — keep the adapter's keyring short.
| Your situation | Start with | Entry cost |
|---|---|---|
| You live in Microsoft Office | M365 Copilot or Claude add-ins | +$21–30/user · or ~$20/mo |
| You live in Google Workspace | Gemini — it's already bundled | in the plan (~$14/user) |
| One agent for chat + files + design + Office | Claude Pro (Cowork · Design · add-ins) | ~$20/mo |
| A tool nobody has a connector for | Zapier MCP / Make | ~$10–30/mo + AI plan |
The pattern everywhere: business tiers carry the admin controls, data guarantees and regional availability. Consumer tiers get features first — workplaces get them safely. July 2026.
The chat window is the smallest part of what exists. Agents do work and hand you files — decks, pages, audio, spreadsheets.
Each lab's ~$20 tier buys a different toolbox. Try what's included — Cowork, Design, Notebook, agent mode — before buying anything niche.
Before real use: commercial licence? public by default? where does the data go? Free tiers rarely cover work.
Thanks! Questions?
David Budáč
All figures verified July 2026. This market moves monthly — re-check the vendor's page before quoting a price outside this room.