A practical guide
Choosing an AI for your business plan
Start with an assistant you already have. No assistant can prove demand by writing about it.
Published November 1, 2026 · Luke F. Walton
As of November 1, 2026. Start with an assistant you already use, or try a free option. You do not need a paid subscription to use this planner. Availability, limits, and features vary by account and region and can change; the official links below are the place to check before paying.
For this job, a useful assistant asks good questions, follows your context, and makes it easy to examine its claims. No assistant can validate demand by writing about it.
The options
These are practical ways to try the tools, not a ranking or a performance benchmark. Try the same planning question in more than one if you want to compare.
| Assistant | Free access and official source | A useful planning task to try | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | A free plan is available; some capabilities have limits. | Work through a section in conversation and ask it to turn answers into a concise outline. | A polished outline can hide unsupported assumptions. Ask what it inferred. |
| Claude | A free plan is available with limited usage. | Give it a draft and ask where the reasoning needs evidence or explanation. | Readable prose does not establish that a recommendation fits your business. |
| Perplexity | Standard is free, with limits on advanced features. | Look for sources that could help answer a specific research question. | Open every consequential citation. A link alone does not show that it supports the answer. |
| Google AI Mode / Gemini | Google offers free-tier access alongside paid plans. Availability varies. | Use AI Mode to explore a question with web sources, or paste the prompt into Gemini for a conversation. | The planner’s Google link opens AI Mode, not the Gemini app. Check the original sources. |
| Grok | Free access is available, with limits and paid options. | Ask it to propose counterarguments and questions you have overlooked. | Current web or social discussion may be unrepresentative of your actual customers. |
All can be useful for drafting and questioning. All can be wrong. Features such as web access and file uploads depend on the product and plan; do not assume the tool has read a page just because it mentions it.
Give it a job it can do
Copy a section prompt from the planner. Tell the assistant what kind of business this is and which decision you are trying to make. Ask it to distinguish your facts from its suggestions.
A small task is easier to evaluate: “What assumptions in this price need testing?” or “What should I ask a potential customer about how they solve this today?”
Ask for primary sources for factual claims. When something matters to your decision, verify it outside the conversation. Your actual customer conversations and supplier quotes are stronger inputs than invented examples.
Keep the numbers in the calculator
An assistant can suggest costs you may have missed. You decide whether to add them and which amounts to enter. Use the startup cost and break-even tools for arithmetic. A scenario is a set of assumptions, not a forecast.
Check privacy before pasting
This site does not call these services. Copying a prompt does not send it. Pasting it into an assistant or opening a direct link shares its content with that provider; an opened link includes the prompt in the address. Review the provider’s privacy policy and settings before sharing private material.
You can skip AI entirely
Every question, calculator, plan view, and export works without an assistant. Use one when it helps you think and act. Leave it out when it adds work.
For the actual workflow, read how to use AI to write a business plan. Using AI in a business that is already running is a separate topic covered by Surmado Learn. Luke operates this site and is Surmado’s founder, with a financial interest in it.