The AI app market is forecast to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 80.7% over the next five years, according to the AI App Report. Chatbots, image editors and media generators are seeing enormous growth in usage and number of apps available, as more and more people are drawn to this burgeoning sector.
Our AI App Market Landscape shows the key players in each subsector of the AI app market.
LLMs
Large language models form the foundation of generative AI applications, trained on billions of parameters to grasp the context and meaning behind queries, enabling them to generate text, images, and video that meet user needs. These have been integrated into all of the main chatbot and image editing services through APIs.
Some of the key LLMs on the market are OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and Meta Llama. DeepSeek made a huge entrance into the market in January 2025 with the launch of its V3 model, built at less than a tenth the cost of GPT while reaching similar performance metrics.
General Assistants
LLMs have been most widely embedded and adopted in the form of general assistants, or chatbots, in which the user can type questions and receive responses in the form of text, images and video. How the chatbot responds will depend on the query, with users able to mold the conversation to meet their demands.
ChatGPT was the original spark that set off the AI race, with Gemini, Copilot, Grok and Claude all coming later on as competitors. Quite a few apps use the same LLM as ChatGPT to power their own chatbots, such as Nova, ChatOn and Genie. In China, Duobao and DeepSeek are the most popular chatbots.
Search Engine
Some chatbots are focused on the search side, integrating heavily with news channels and sourcing data from the web rather than from data that trained the underlying model. This means that data from the chatbot tends to be more current and backed up by other sources.
Bing, which embedded ChatGPT shortly after Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI, offers the best of both worlds with generative responses and traditional search tools. Perplexity is purely focused on the generative AI side, and pulls from a variety of official news sources and publications which it has partnered with.
Virtual Personalities
Character.ai jumped on a trend of users asking their chatbots to have a certain personality, sometimes requesting the personality in the form of a historical figure or celebrity. Now there are marketplaces of personalities that span almost every genre.
While character.ai was the first to offer this virtual personalities marketplace, other have followed, with PolyBuzz and chai.ai being two of the most popular.
Image
Generative AIs other big claim to fame is in the form of image generation, with AI models being fed millions of different images to be able to create new ones on the fly to meet the demands of the user.
Midjourney is one of the most popular apps in this space, originally operating out of Discord. Other apps, like Remini and Picsart, pivoted to generative AI following the success of ChatGPT, offering photo editing and generation tools as part of their subscription package.
Video
Expected to be the next big pillar of generative AI, video generators are also marred with more uncertainty due to the potential for misinformation and fraud. App developers are tentatively launching these tools, with PixVerse and Luma AI two of the most popular tools.
Some of the biggest LLM providers, such as OpenAI, Google and Meta, are slowly pushing these services to public usage. There are also video editing tools that use AI, such as InShot and Vidma.
Music
Using generative AI to make beats is another nascent market that a few apps are trying to crack. Large language models trained on millions of hours of music are able to, with moderate accuracy at the moment, build beats and songs based on text queries.
Suno is the lead app in this market and is considered the most sophisticated of the lot, although the major players have yet to broaden their services to this subcategory. Other apps offering music generation include MyTunes, Udio and Soundraw.
Education
With around 50 million students using generative AI for homework and essays, its no surprise the education app market has seen an sector-wide pivot to AI services. Some have embedded the services into their portfolio, such as Brainly, which offers an AI learning companion and teacher.
Other apps, such as Gauth, Question.AI and Quizard, have the AI service front and center. Users can upload test papers and the AI provides step-by-step methods for solving each question.
Health & Fitness
Health and fitness is another market seeing a lot of new apps launched with AI as the main selling point. Instead of having a set of gym routines and recipes, the generative AI can built personalized routines and meals, which work to the specific requests of the user.
Cal AI provides an image recognition technology to quickly scan food and provide calories, while Fitbod and Evolve create personalized routines for workouts. Youper offers an AI chatbot to help with mental health.