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🧰 3 WhatsApp AI Tools for Smarter Lead Gen
Published about 7 hours ago • 5 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week, I’m looking at AI WhatsApp tools that can turn everyday chats into leads.
If you run a small business, you’ll most likely need a WhatsApp number to communicate with customers, but that can be time consuming.
So I went looking for a smarter way to manage WhatsApp and turn it into a lead-generation machine.
I tested three tools that all let you build AI bots, so you can stop neglecting this client acquisition and support channel while still being productive.
Plus, you’ll find a free WordPress plugin from Robert (my boss) that fixes messy Google Docs pastes, a smart Gemini-in-Drive trick for proposals, and a new AI-gone-wrong story.
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If giving clients your WhatsApp number sounds like a surefire way to spend even more time on your phone, Wati is one of the cleaner fixes I found. It turns WhatsApp into a proper team inbox, with automations layered on top for sales, support, and lead handling.
What I like most is that it feels easy to use. The backend is tidy, and setting up simple rules is refreshingly straightforward. You can send out-of-hours replies, route chats, use AI, and build automations without wading through a messy interface. It also supports Instagram, Facebook, and SMS, though that is also its limit: if you need lots of channels, the other tools below are a better fit – Respond.io especially.
There is no free plan, which is a pity, but Wati does offer a 7-day free trial with no credit card. For small businesses that want to stay focused on WhatsApp first and get something live quickly, it is a very solid option.
Another good alternative to automate and make your WhatsApp marketing more efficient is Superchat. It pulls WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, email, SMS, and live chat into one inbox, which makes it much easier to stay on top of customer messages without hopping between apps.
What I liked most is that unlike most tools in this category, it offers a free plan. You also get a shared inbox, automations, AI agents, a web widget, and integrations for the rest of your setup. That said, it felt less straightforward than Wati in places, and the pricing climbs faster. Features like WhatsApp newsletters, AI Copilot, and Analytics are also paid add-ons.
Superchat also has pre-built WhatsApp AI agents for support and sales, which is a smart touch. In my experience, setting up the support agent was fairly easy thanks to the guided flow, and that part felt simpler than Respond.io. Of course, to get the best out of it, you’ll need to tweak it a few times.
I’d look at Superchat if you want a free starting point, need more channels than Wati, and want ready-made AI agents without too much setup. If you need even broader channel coverage, Respond.io goes further, but Superchat felt easier to get going with.
If your leads come in from a few different channels, Respond.io starts making a lot of sense. It pulls WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, and more into one inbox, so you are not bouncing between tabs every time a customer replies somewhere else.
It also goes well beyond a shared inbox: you get workflows, broadcasts, reports, lead routing, and AI agent templates for receptionist, sales, and support use cases, plus the option to build your own. That flexibility is the main selling point, but it also explains the downside: more channels + more moving parts = more cost. It doesn’t have a free plan, but you do get to trial the platform without having to add a credit card.
In my testing, I appreciated how many channels and features it supports more than the setup flow itself. The AI tools are solid, but I still found Superchat and Wati’s interface easier for creating agents because it needed fewer steps.
🛠️ Alternative to: Wati, Superchat, shared inbox tools
Few things ruin a smooth publishing workflow faster than pasting a clean Google Doc into WordPress and getting hit with random styles, spans, and broken spacing.
That is exactly what Tooltester Clean Paste for Google Docs fixes. Robert built it using Claude Code to solve an internal Tooltester problem, and the plugin strips out the ugly junk while keeping the formatting you actually need, like lists, bold, italic, and underline.
This little WordPress plugin is extremely powerful because it does one ‘boring’ job really well. The limitation is also the point: it’s a very specific fix, so it only matters if Google Docs to WordPress is part of your regular workflow.
But if you publish blog posts, newsletters, or client drafts in WordPress, this free plugin can save you a lot of tedious cleanup time.
Choosing a tool or vendor should not feel like detective work. But once you have 3 proposals, a contract, and a long email thread open, that is usually what happens. Gemini in Drive is handy here – or any other AI assistant that has access to your drive.
Before you pick a software tool, freelancer, agency, or other vendor, upload the proposals or contracts to Google Drive and ask Gemini to compare them side by side. Ask it to look at scope, deliverables, dates, hidden costs, cancellation terms, and any red flags.
A few examples:
one software vendor includes onboarding, another charges extra
one freelancer says delivery in 10 days, another promises a first draft in 10 days
one agency gives you a 30-day exit, another quietly locks you in for longer
one proposal looks cheaper until support or migration fees show up
This will not replace legal advice, and it should not. But it is a very good way to spot differences faster before you make a decision, and reading ToS or contracts is not good for your soul (unless you get paid for it).
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Nine seconds.
That’s all it reportedly took for an AI coding agent to delete a company’s production database and its backups.
In a recent Guardian story, PocketOS founder Jeremy Crane said Cursor, running Anthropic’s Claude model, guessed instead of asking, ignored clear safety instructions, and wiped live data. The fallout wasn’t abstract: car-rental businesses suddenly lost access to the software they needed for reservations and vehicle handovers.
That’s the part small teams shouldn’t shrug off. AI can look brilliant in a demo, but once it touches real systems, it also gets real power. Give it broad permissions, weak guardrails, and no approval step, and a “helpful fix” can turn into a business-stopping mistake. My takeaway is simple: keep backups offsite, limit what an agent can access, require human approval for anything destructive, and do a final human check before changes hit production. AI can save hours, but it can also burn through them very fast.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. Next time, I’ll share tools to perform better customer research.
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🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly. Hola friend 👋, I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort. This week: the tools I’m actually using right now. It’s easy to get distracted by shiny new apps, especially when every week brings another “game-changing” launch. But the tools that really matter are usually the ones you keep opening without thinking. Today, I’m sharing three tools that genuinely help me publish...