By now somebody has told you that your business needs AI. Perhaps it was your accountant, who swears by ChatGPT. Perhaps your IT support company, which wants you on Copilot because the office already runs on Microsoft 365.
Perhaps your daughter, home from university, who does everything in Claude. The advice is confident, contradictory, and rarely comes with prices attached — and the three subscription pages read like the same brochure with different logos. This column has now spent seven weeks using these tools on real finance work — spreadsheets, cash flow forecasts, receipts, dashboards, slides, and last week an agent that drafts variance commentary.
So this week, the comparison, with one caveat up front: all three are good, all three are improving quickly, and the right answer depends far more on how your office already works than on any league table. Prices and features below were checked the week of writing, and they change often — treat them as a snapshot, not scripture. The most useful question is not “which AI is smartest?” but “where does my work alreadyhappen?” (Branded graphic by PGH Consulting, LLC) Start with where your documents live The most useful question is not “which AI is smartest?” It is “where does my work already happen?” If your office lives in Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams on a Microsoft 365 business plan, Copilot starts with home advantage: it sits inside the tools your staff already have open, and there is no new habit to build.
If your office runs on Google Workspace, or on a mix of tools, a chat-first assistant like ChatGPT or Claude is the more natural fit — you bring the work to it, as this column has done for most of the series. The best tool is the one your team will actually open on a busy Thursday. What each one does best: the all-rounder, the long-document writer, and the layer insideMicrosoft 365.
(Branded graphic by PGH Consulting, LLC) What each one does best ChatGPT is the all-rounder and, for most people, the first tool they ever tried. It is strong at exactly the everyday mix a small office throws at it: draft this letter, explain this clause, analyse this export, give me five options for handling a difficult customer. Its data analysis mode does real work on spreadsheets, and the mobile app is polished enough that plenty of owners run their whole relationship with it from a phone.
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