[00:01] understand the AI landscape of 2026 in terms of what tools are available out there and which one you need to learn in order to stay ahead in your job or to have a better career prospector, this video is for you. Like I said, there are
[00:15] have this cloud, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, and then you have Notebook LM, Runway ML, and then you have Zapier, Gamma, Napkin, all those tools. But, the Gamma, Napkin, all those tools. But, the question is which one you actually need?
[00:29] And on top of that, you have this free tier and paid tier confusion. Whether the free tier is sufficient or you need to buy the paid version. All these questions will be answered in this video. But first, let's take a look
[00:43] at this really beautiful thoughtful chart. Every dot you see in this chart represents 3.2 million people. In essence, all the dots here represents the entire world's population. Just look
[00:58] at those gray dots. These are the people who don't use AI at all. And look at those green dots. These are the people who use tools like ChatGPT, Gemini for conversation,
[01:12] ChatGPT, Gemini for conversation, generating all those jiggly images. And yellow dots represents the people who pay $20 per month utilizing AI. You know, they might be using Claude code or something like that
[01:27] which they are using to get their work done faster. there is this red dot. These are the power users. They probably pay, you know, like $200 a month or more than that.
[01:40] And they do pretty much, you know, more than 70% of their work with the help of Now, you tell me, where does the exclusivity lies? Of because if you're watching this video, you must have at least tried something
[01:54] you're in this green dot. You have to decide whether you should move to this decide whether you should move to this yellow region or the red region depending upon how much of leverage you're taking from it.
[02:07] tier. They always stick to the free tools, but they're the hackers. They always know how to get the best out of the free tools. They keep hacking stuff. And they get to benefit a lot and they
[02:21] get to benefit a lot even after using the free tier. But for people who don't have that much hacker I would recommend to go for a paid
[02:35] version. Because, let me tell you, currently we are using internet subscription, a mobile phone subscription. in some time in 6 months' time or 1 year's time
[02:49] I see a world where everybody has some kind of an AI subscription. But as of today, not many people are using the paid models. But I'm pretty sure if you are moving to the paid version of
[03:02] the models where you get the best model out there you get to leverage a lot. But if you've never started using AI you should start with the free tools and then gradually move to the paid tiers.
[03:15] This would be my suggestion. Okay. But now you're asking me, "Okay, I don't uh what is there in the free version? What is there in the paid version? I don't know any of that." Hold on. I'm going to explain all of that in a very
[03:29] detailed way. I want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, OpenRouter. Let me ask you something. What happens to your app when OpenAI has an outage or Anthropic is rate limiting? Most production apps just break. Your user
[03:43] sees error, your team scrambles, [music] you lose trust. OpenRouter fixes this with automatic fallback routing. You set a primary model and a backup model. If
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[04:09] app working when your users need it. We use this at Code Basics for our internal AI tools. We have not had a single user-facing outage after we switched to Open Router. If you are serious about shipping AI in production, you need
[04:24] this. Try Open Router using the link in the video description below. That is openrouter.ai. >> Just to summarize what I said, if you want to be in the top of your AI game, what do you need to do? You need to
[04:36] first start using AI. You should move from this never used AI zone to you should be using some of the free tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. Even in Claude, there is a free version. And then, you can consider becoming the
[04:50] paid AI user, where you would get some exclusive paid features which are not going to see what is that. And then, you move on to become the power user. In this way, you can climb to become the one who is in the top of
[05:03] the AI game. In general, I told you going to paid version is better for a long-term benefit. But, if you are just starting with AI, you should understand what are the different kind of AI tools. And in each of them,
[05:15] whether you should go for a free tier or a paid tier. The AI tools can be broadly You have AI chat, then you have AI creators, and then builders. Okay?
[05:28] So, I'm going to explain each of them. What is this category? What are the And I'm going to tell you in each of this, whether you should go for a free tier or paid tier based on your use case. Let's start with the AI chat.
[05:42] So, AI chat is nothing but all these tools, right? You have seen this Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok. So, you have used these tools to chat, like it's your thinking partner.
[05:54] You give them some prompt and it gives you a response and you use it in your work or day-to-day life. So, the most popular one of this is Claude and in Claude there are both free and paid versions. In the free version, you get
[06:08] to use the Sonnet model and in the Pro version, you have the better one. Opus But, for the conversational purpose, there is you that with an example. So, let's take I have a use case where I
[06:24] got an email and I have to decline that email. It is email and I need a very polished email put the response in a very nice way. So, I can use Claude for this. So, I've just
[06:37] draft a polite email declining a meeting." And you can see the response free version, by the way. And I'm going to show you the example in the paid version as well. As you can see, I'm just putting the same prompt, attaching
[06:51] the same document. And the response here is pretty much good. It is better, I would say, but the free version is not bad, either. So, using AI as a thinking partner, free tier is good enough because even if you
[07:04] expire your usage in the free tier of Claude, you can switch to ChatGPT. You can switch to Gemini. You can switch to Perplexity. There are enough tools for you've never used AI before and if you're starting with AI as a thinking
[07:18] partner, which is AI chat, stick with the free tier. No need to go for a paid version as of now. So, then the next category is AI creators where you describe something and AI creates it for you. What AI can create? AI can
[07:30] a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, PDFs and all this stuff. How many images we have seen on the internet that is being created from AI? And then we have videos. For creating documents,
[07:45] you can pretty much create it for free from all the major providers like OpenAI, Gemini, uh you know, then there is Claude. It's well, you can use ChatGPT, Gemini, and you can
[08:00] create pretty much uh free images with decent quality. Of course, with paid version, you get a much higher superior quality. And for videos, there aren't many tools which can create free videos. It can
[08:12] give you like two or three seconds or 10 second videos, but not not a longer one. So, for videos, mostly, there are only paid versions available. Okay? So, let me give you an example. I'm using a free version of Gemini here. And
[08:25] what I'm going to do is, let's say I I want to create a banner uh for my team's event, right? And the graphic designer is not available at the moment. I can simply, you know, just use this prompt. Create a professional banner. By the
[08:38] way, I'm going to attach this prompt document in the description. You can use this prompt and try it for yourself using these free tools. If you are one who has not done this before, I highly recommend you to do this because
[08:53] watching is nothing is basically nothing. It has no leverage. Only if you act, only if you build something with it, you are going to get some leverage going to attach the prompt document in the description. So, you can see, even
[09:06] with the free version, you can get this kind of output. Okay? So, to summarize, Gemini, ChatGPT. In the images, again, you can use Gemini, ChatGPT. For videos, there is VEO, Kling, SeeDance, SixField,
[09:19] and all those tools. Like I said, for videos, mostly, it is the paid version. videos, go for the paid version because in the free version, currently, as of now, there aren't good tools.
[09:32] Likewise, for images, there is a limit. And for documents, there is a limit in creating too many images or too many documents, you can still stick with the the third category, this is the most interesting one. So, we have AI agents.
[09:48] So far, what we have seen, you ask something to AI, and it gives And mostly, you are telling AI what to do, right? But what if the AI can think
[10:01] on its own? AI has its own cognition. It decides what to do depending upon the outcome. That is agent. In agent, you just tell AI acts.
[10:13] And there are these tools, you know, Claude, Cohere, and then there is OpenAI operator, then there is Mana. These are agents. free, try Mana. Mana, there is a free tier as
[10:27] changing things, and as of now, there is a free tier. So, what I'm going to ask you to do is like let's say there is a scenario where you have to find the cheapest Delhi to
[10:39] Mumbai flight for next Friday. Somebody asked you to do that, or you're doing it So, normally, what you would do, you would go and open multiple browsers, you would check multiple websites, and you would do all of those things manually,
[10:52] right? So, just with this prompt, you can see that Mana is opening my browser. the browser. It is basically clicking that plus button and opening a new browser, and it is It is scanning the prices. It is
[11:05] scrolling down. It is doing all those things which I would do manually. And it being is doing it, and it gives you the results. So, you can see this is the result. These are the flights available, and this is the price and and and the
[11:19] here, right? Like you can You can tell You can ask it to place an order. If you If you make enough connections, it can even place an order for you.
[11:31] But just understand AI as an agent is something that does things autonomously. step what to do, right? That is an AI agent. What I've showed you is a free tier of models. I also want to show you something paid, what it can do. In my
[11:48] opinion, the paid version of an agent makes a significant difference because the model itself is so powerful. I'm talking about Claude Cowork. It is something I'm using on a regular basis, and I can show you a live demo here. So,
[12:01] this is Claude Cowork. So, what I can do here is I'm going to take an example. So, just consider this folder where I have all these expenses, right? So, I March, and all those things. So, what I want to do is I want to create an end
[12:16] outcome like this where I categorized all the expenses based on the date, all the expenses based on the date, vendor, amount, and the the category, and uh and the total amount. So, just imagine if I have to convert
[12:28] all these files to this one, right? All these files to different folders, and then create a summary Excel sheet, it's going to take me a lot of time, right? But, with
[12:40] Cowork, this can happen within less than 3 or 4 minutes. I'm going to show you now. So, what I need to do here is I'm simply going to connect my folder. This is very easy. Just choose the
[12:53] folder here. And then, select the actual folder where your files exist. This is where my files exist. Just selecting the path Selected the folder. So, what I'll do now is simply write this prompt.
[13:09] folders, organize them into sub folders. That is the first task I'm giving it. how it should be. And rename each with a clear format, And then, I'm also adding one more thing because I wanted Excel sheet. And then,
[13:25] create a final summary in a Excel sheet. So, Claude has two modes currently. So, it's like ask before acting, act without asking. know, if you have any questions, ask me because sometimes it might delete things
[13:40] or move things without me approving it. So, I want approval at important to me. I don't want to mess with it. So, I'm just saying this.
[13:53] handle it?" Existing month folder 01 February. I'm just saying keep both, copy to a new folder type folders. And what should be the date format? This should be my date format. So, let's say if I have not specified this, if I have
[14:06] not told Claude to ask me questions, it would have assumed something and it would have gone with a format which I might not like. And then I have to change it again. So, it's always best to use the ask mode if you're not sure, if
[14:18] you're not giving a lot of details. So, interesting part is you can see the progress here, you know, as what it is doing. And uh you can recommend a change if if you are thinking that it should not do this as a second step. You can
[14:30] this button. This is very interesting and useful showing the live folder as Claude is working. I'm going to put it in two different screens. As Claude is working, it is making changes in my folder. It
[14:44] has created these different subcategories, food and dining. You can see it has already organized these files, grocery, travel and lodging. And it also renamed the file in the
[14:56] format that I told it to, you know, this DDMM year year year underscore the vendor name. So, currently it is building the Excel summary. So, I would soon. Yeah, you can see that now. It just appeared. It also created that
[15:10] everything uh based on my initial input and the final outcome. You see, this is why I'm telling it's an agent because the agent decides what steps to be done in order to achieve the outcome?
[15:24] It has decided it autonomously. It did not ask me for instruction, right? It knew this is the outcome that I'm going to achieve, and it asked me questions wherever it is necessary, like how a team member would do, and then it
[15:37] created everything. Yeah, so finally we are yes, finally it says now everything is done. You can open this expense summary. You can see now this is exactly like how I wanted it. It shows me the total expense,
[15:50] So I want to show this quick demo just to make you understand that how a paid tier of agent works, and I hope you got the idea. So the final category is AI builder. This is nothing but your technical co-pilot, which means you want
[16:05] to build something, right? And don't think when I'm saying building person. No, you don't need to be a technical person. Let's say you want to a website, you want to build a Google Chrome extension, you want to build
[16:20] things can be done by non-technical people as well. And for this, the two tools that are major out there is anti-gravity, Cloud Code. There are also tools like Replit, which which was popular before, but right now these two
[16:34] tools are the popular ones, anti-gravity and Cloud Code. And uh also yeah, GitHub co-pilot, which is which is quite going to show you an example with the free tier, which is the Google AI Studio
[16:49] or anti-gravity. You can you can pretty much do the same with anti-gravity as what I'm going to do is like build a simple GST calculator, because uh GST calculation is something that is very common, very often used by my team, and
[17:02] I want to build a simple GST calculator so that people won't come and ask me all the time how how the GST should be calculated for this and that. So this is a simple GST calculator. And and it's very simple, right? You just
[17:14] gave a prompt, and it starts writing the code. It just writes the code. You can this is the code, right? You don't You don't have to know the code. You just have to know the product, the final outcome, and you have to verify it.
[17:27] This is just something that is done in like 4 to 5 minutes. You You don't have that's what I'm saying. If you are watching this video you are not getting any leverage. You're just knowing something, but you're not
[17:41] getting any leverage out of it. So, go ahead and build this. I'm going to give you all this prompts so that you can also build it. Okay. So, now with the free version, you can do this much. But, there is a limitation here. With free
[17:54] version, you can't do much, and the the models are also not that good. If you want to build something serious, I'll show you one live example, real example of what we have built using Claude code. So, this is the CodeBasics Foundation
[18:07] website. We have launched this recently. And this website, you can go for So, this is a proper functioning website. It has a lot of functions in it where people also contribute. They also register. They also become a volunteer.
[18:22] There are a lot of lot of things in it, you know, like you can view programs. So, it is properly functional website. And it is built using Claude code and antigravity. And this is not built by any technical person. This is not built
[18:34] by a software engineer. This is built by a finance manager who is not a technical person. And I'm telling you, the person who built it was not able to believe it before you know, they actually built it. But, only when they got into it and they
[18:48] started building it, they believed it, and they finally built it. And likewise, their tools, you know, their own tools and own versions using Claude code they have learned a bit of technical knowledge along the way. It's not like
[19:03] you can be completely oblivious about the technical know-hows and build along the way. But, in order to build something, you should You don't have to be a coder or someone who would understand all the software engineering.
[19:16] So, coming back to this, in the AI builder category, you can actually build you can build an application. The free tier is limited. You can't do much with something serious, you have to go for the paid tier. But, if you want to do
[19:29] a free tier. So, let me summarize everything. So, there are four categories, AI tools, which is chat. Free tier is good enough. Creators free tier is good enough, but for creating
[19:41] more professional images and videos, you need a paid tier. For agents, free tier is good if you're doing minimal task, but with paid tier, there is a significant difference. And the same thing holds true for builders.
[19:54] tiers is good enough. Agents and builders, you would go for paid tier. direction of agents and builders, you are becoming the power user, and you are getting to the top of the AI game. This is for everyone. I'm not separating
[20:10] This is for everyone. And the most important thing to know, the skills you learn, especially prompting, it will work across all the tools, you know, not right? Some people ask me that I have learned this prompting in ChatGPT, would
[20:24] it work in other No, prompting is a general skill, you know, it will work across all the all the tools, and it is your ability to communicate to the AI. giving you a decision table, AI tool decision table as of now. This is May
[20:38] 2026. You can use this table to make a decision you can stick with the free tier or move to a paid subscription. And do not forget this chart. Just understand your exclusivity lies in when you are
[20:52] moving to this yellow zone and red zone. If you are someone who's capable of doing everything within the green zone, go for it. But, for most people, it possible with the paid version. So, that's it, folks. I hope you're able to
[21:06] understand the landscape of AI in 2026 as of now. And like I said, go, practice, build something. Just watching this video is not going to Just watching this video is not going to help you. All the best.