Tools Directory
AI and AI-enabled tools for communications workflows, assessed by Michael MacLennan against real-world comms tasks.
77 tools available
Not sure where AI fits in your workflow yet? Take the 5-minute AI Readiness Scorecard and we'll point you to the right tools and templates first.
Choosing tools for a particular job? Start with the guide for your comms stream, organised job by job and re-tested every three months.
How we review tools
Every entry carries one of three levels. Tested by Faur means Michael MacLennan has used the tool hands-on in live work, run it against actual comms tasks and verified the claims. Desk-reviewed means the entry was assessed from public documentation, vendor information and practitioner sources, without hands-on testing. Watching means the tool is on our radar and not yet reviewed. Every reviewed entry shows the month it was last verified. Pricing is verified at point of review; always check the vendor site for current rates. Paid listings never appear among the reviewed tools: if a tool is sponsored, it sits in its own clearly labelled block below them, marked as a paid placement we have not tested or ranked. How sponsored listings work.
We also test assistants against each other. In the Comms AI Pentathlon 2026, eight AI assistants answered five comms briefs and judged each other blind, with every entry and score published.
Going further? Applied Comms With AI publishes detailed hands-on reviews, head-to-head comparisons, and implementation experiments for each tool category.
Research & Intelligence
Media monitoring, social listening, audience research, and competitor analysis
Writing & Editing
AI writing assistants, grammar checkers, and content optimisation
Planning & Strategy
Project management, content calendars, and campaign planning
Distribution & Publishing
Social media management, scheduling, and multi-channel publishing
Visual & Creative
Graphic design tools for non-designers and visual content creation
GEO & AI Visibility
Generative engine optimisation and AI visibility monitoring tools
Monitoring & Measurement
Analytics platforms, reporting tools, and performance dashboards
Workflow & Productivity
Approval workflows, collaboration tools, and automation
No tools match your current filters.
Worth watching
Tools on our radar. Not yet recommended, but being tracked for inclusion in a future review cycle.
Enterprise AI search platform with GEO visibility tracking and agentic commerce feeds, worth watching
www.botify.com ↗Newly launched GEO platform tracking brand positioning across LLMs and AI search bots
www.geoanalyzerpro.com ↗Narrative intelligence platform blending media, search, social and AI-citation data into one graph
www.shadow.inc ↗AI-native "PR Operations" platform spanning media, social and AI-answer visibility, worth watching
agentcy.com.pr ↗Enterprise employee-communications platform for measurement-led internal comms
www.poppulo.com ↗The category definer for AI-simulated research participants, and the most publicly criticised
www.syntheticusers.com ↗Synthetic B2B buyer research sold as a consultancy, aimed at audiences you cannot afford to recruit
www.evidenza.ai ↗Large-scale population simulation that forecasts what people will do, including how an announcement lands
aaru.com ↗Enterprise AI-visibility platform with broad surface coverage and AI agent-traffic monitoring, worth watching
www.scrunchai.com ↗Full-stack GEO toolkit on a Track / Understand / Act workflow, worth watching
www.evertune.ai ↗Meeting intelligence with in-meeting web research (Talk to Fireflies, powered by Perplexity), worth watching
fireflies.ai ↗Agentic social media management (AI drafting, image generation and multi-channel scheduling), worth watching
www.ocoya.com ↗Want deeper reviews?
Applied publishes detailed tool reviews, experiments, and comparisons.
Visit Applied