The AI model guide: five best tools for marketing

Most marketers treat AI like it’s one tool. But asking ChatGPT to generate a photorealistic product shot is like asking a novelist to paint your portrait – wrong tool, wrong result.

Just as you wouldn’t hire the same person to write your copy, design your website, and film your ads, you shouldn’t expect one AI model to excel at everything.

Our experts have tested dozens of AI models and chosen the five that consistently deliver the best results for: creative collaboration, image generation, precise image editing, video creation, and voice generation. Here’s exactly what to use each for.

Which AI model should you use? A quick reference guide:

1. GPT-5.1: The shapeshifter

Where Google can still feel a bit stiff and business-like, GPT-5 feels more like working with a witty, creative friend. It specialises in interactive collaboration, helping you brainstorm ideas or refine your writing effortlessly.

What you can use it for:

Co-writing dialogue for a film script

• Developing fresh brand voice guidelines through collaborative drafts and tone exploration.
• Creating brand personas that can serve as genuine audiences.

And if you turn up reasoning to ‘medium’…

…so it thinks for longer about your problem before responding, and pair it with OpenAI’s Code Interpreter tool (which lets it write and run Python code for complex data analysis, coding, and maths problems), you’ve now got a highly intelligent analyst with world-class Excel skills on your team that can:

• Process and analyse spreadsheets with thousands of rows in seconds.
• Perform complex statistical analysis.
• Generate publication-ready visuals.

What you can use it for:

• Extracting specific data from spreadsheets and creating new spreadsheets containing that data.
• Comparing spreadsheets and performing common tasks like reconciliation.
• Creating graphs and performing statistical analysis.
• Carrying out more accurate visual analysis.

2. Google Imagen 4 Ultra: The image whisperer

Imagen 4 Ultra is a text-to-image model that gets what you want – it focuses on photorealism and precision. While other models grab the public’s attention with cheap edits (🍌), Imagen interprets highly detailed prompts and abstract ideas, delivers sharp, realistic imagery in whatever form you need and renders text better than any other model we’ve used.

What you can use it for:

• Producing photorealistic campaign imagery without the need for complex prompts.
• Generating authentic visuals across a wide range of styles – from cinematic shots to non-cinematic content such as sports, events or UGC.
• Accurate text rendering – Imagen 4 handles text within images beautifully, maintaining typography and style.
• Quickly iterating branded image assets while staying true to your creative brief.

3. Flux Kontext: The precision editor

With most AI image editors, if you ask for one small tweak, the whole picture changes. But with Flux Kontext, you get genuine in-context editing – just describe the subtle change you want, and it will preserve the rest of the image. It understands natural language unusually well too, so you can make iterative, surgical edits without starting from scratch.

What you can use it for:

• Swapping out packaging or backgrounds for A/B testing, while keeping everything else the same.
• Localising images (from food to clothing) for different regions.
• Finessing ads – like tweaking a single shadow or smile – to improve click‑through rate.
• Making subtle changes to ensure a set of campaign images matches the style guide or brand aesthetic.

4. Google Veo 3: The video game-changer

When Veo 3 launched, it set a new standard for AI-generated video. The leap wasn’t just in fidelity – sharper motion, more accurate anatomy, more believable physics – but in sound. Veo 3 can generate synchronised audio alongside video, from dialogue to ambient effects, making lip-sync hacks a thing of the past. Its standout feature? Candid talking-head style clips that look and feel like real interviews, spawning an entirely new genre of AI-first content. Yes 3.1 is out now, but Veo 3 is definitely still worthy of consideration if you’re looking for consistent, believable framing. More on this in our comparison of 3 with 3.1 here.

What you can use it for:

• Generating lifelike video explainers or interviews.
• Quick-turn social ads with natural-sounding voiceovers.
• Going from concept script to finished video in minutes.
• Producing realistic background b-roll for presentations, explainers or ads.

5. Eleven Multilingual v2: The studio in your pocket

ElevenLabs dominates AI voice generation. What makes it special? The sheer volume and quality of voices to choose from are convincingly human.

What you can use it for:

• Text-to-voice: creating lifelike voiceovers for ads, explainers or training videos straight from a script.
• Voice-to-voice: transforming existing recordings into new voices or languages without losing nuance.
• Prototyping and testing audio content quickly, before committing to full studio production.

One platform, all these possibilities

Definition AI is a fully branded private AI suite, giving you access to the world’s most powerful AI models in one secure place. You get the right tool for each job – without the subscription fatigue, without the trial and error, and without compromising on quality.

Every tool on Definition AI is hand-picked by our experts for marketers who want to do brilliant work, faster.

Written by Luke Budka, AI director

Nick Banks, Senior Writer and AI Specialist

And Sian Evans, Head of Video at Definition.

Published on 22/01/2026.