Every week, a new AI tool shows up in someone's feed. A colleague mentions it in a meeting. A tweet makes it sound like the answer to everything. And the person reading that tweet, the one trying to figure out which tools actually matter for their team, has no trusted filter. They're on their own.
That's the problem we set out to solve with the AI Tools catalog inside Solutioner.ai, the platform we deploy exclusively for our consulting clients. It's one piece of a larger system we use to support AI transformation work, but it's become one of the most immediately useful.
What the catalog actually is
Solutioner.ai is our platform for managing AI opportunities across a client engagement. It handles use case intake, prioritization, and pipeline tracking. The AI Tools catalog sits alongside that work as a curated reference. Right now, we've cataloged 49 tools across eight categories: AI Assistants, Code and Dev Tools, Productivity, Analytics and Data, Automation and Integration, Sales and Marketing, Creative and Image, and Security and Governance. Every one of those 49 tools has an expert opinion attached to it.
I should be honest about the word "expert" here. I joke that we're only experts because we concentrate on this full-time, which means we're roughly three weeks ahead of everyone else. In a space that moves this fast, three weeks is actually a meaningful edge. We're not Gartner. We don't have a team of 200 analysts producing Magic Quadrants. But for a mid-market company trying to understand whether Glean is worth evaluating, or what Eightfold AI actually does, or how Harvey fits into a legal team's workflow, our perspective carries weight because we're in the field doing this work every day.
How we keep it current
Here's where it gets interesting, and where our own AI operations practice feeds directly into the product we give our clients.
We built a custom skill inside Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, that lets us research a tool, draft an opinion, and publish it to the catalog in minutes. The skill knows our L1/L2/L3 framework (individual productivity, workflow automation, and custom applications), it knows our writing standards, and it knows how to save directly to the Solutioner.ai platform through a connected integration.
In practice, this means I can be scrolling Twitter on a Saturday morning, see a tool I haven't evaluated yet, open Claude, and say "research this tool and draft an expert opinion." Claude pulls current information, assesses where the tool fits in our framework, writes a client-ready opinion, and waits for my review. Once I approve it, it's live in the catalog. The whole process takes about five minutes, and I've done it from my phone on a walk more than once.
This is the kind of workflow we teach our clients to build. We use AI to accelerate our own ability to deliver value, and the output goes directly into a tool that helps our clients make better decisions.
Since launching the catalog in early February 2026, we've written 49 expert opinions and gone back to revise six of them as the tools or the landscape changed. ChatGPT alone has had four opinion revisions as OpenAI has shipped updates that changed our assessment. That kind of maintenance would be impractical without the workflow we've built.
What makes these opinions different
We're not aggregating G2 reviews or summarizing marketing copy. Each opinion is written by someone who understands the consulting context our clients operate in. We assess what a tool actually does (not the tagline version), where it sits in the L1/L2/L3 framework, who it's right for, and where it falls short.
The catalog includes tools you already know. ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney, Perplexity, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce. Having an opinion on those is table stakes. The real value shows up in the tools most people haven't heard of yet.
Wispr Flo is a voice-to-text tool that handles dictation better than anything natively available. Connex is an automation platform built specifically for financial data workflows. ThoughtSpot brings natural language querying to business intelligence in a way that changes how non-technical teams interact with data. Notis handles AI governance and security monitoring. These are the kinds of tools that our clients wouldn't find on their own, and where a trusted perspective makes the difference between wasting a month on evaluation or getting a clear signal in 90 seconds of reading.
Client-specific enablement
The catalog isn't just a reference library. Inside Solutioner.ai, we can enable specific tools for each client's instance. When a client's AI operators go to identify solutions for a use case, they see the tools that are actually relevant and available to them, not a generic list of everything on the market. That curation is part of what makes the platform useful in practice rather than just informative in theory.
Early days, and that's the point
We're seven weeks into building this catalog. Forty-nine tools, eight categories, full coverage with opinions, and a workflow that lets us add new tools the same day they launch. This is still early. The catalog will grow, the opinions will mature, and we'll continue refining how we deliver this to clients.
But the underlying point is already proven: when you combine domain expertise with AI-powered workflows, you can deliver something that looks like an analyst service at a fraction of the cost and a multiple of the speed. Our clients don't need a Gartner subscription to understand which AI tools matter for their business. They need a trusted advisor who's paying attention every day and has a system for turning that attention into something useful.
That's what this is.