With 75% of employees now using AI at work (see here for all AI statistics), understanding which tools to use is a key concern for many of the business leaders I speak with.

Even if you’re on the Microsoft Suite, you’ll likely have teams and individuals using multiple additional AI tools, so understanding popular platforms is crucial.

Additionally, as we often discuss in the Lead with AI course and community, using these tools yourself becomes paramount as you have to lead others in navigating the human-AI relationship.

To give you clear insights into which tools matter, we put together a monthly AI index. Here’s the May report. 

The AI for Work Top 10: Perplexity, Claude, and Grammarly Gain, Microsoft Copilot Drops

The top 10 AI for Work tools looks very similar to the April Top 100, with a few noteworthy changes:

• #5: Perplexity AI, the ‘if Google and ChatGPT had a baby’ search engine with sources, added 8.5 million visits and booked 15% in traffic growth to now be a Top 5 AI Tools for Work. The solution remains relevant, even after Google rolled out its own “AI overviews,” which recommended people to put glue on pizza.
• #6: Claude, which sprinted from #16 to #8 last month, went up another two spots by growing its visits by 21%. While the number two LLM, with 66 million monthly visits, they’re still falling 1.8 billion visits short of market leader ChatGPT. 
• #8: Grammarly AI, which fell out of the Top 10 last month, is back at number 8 with its hard-to-beat email reply drafting and text editing software. It’s one of the favorites in our Lead with AI course.

Microsoft Copilot dropped from 9 to 13 to make place for the newcomers, despite continued growth.

And speaking of ChatGPT: OpenAI recently started redirecting some users from its old domain chat.openai.com to the dedicated chatgpt.com. As of now, it seems to be a small sample, as only 1.8 million of the 1.8 billion visits to ChatGPT. We’ll monitor this for the following months. 

See below for the full top 10:

Highlight of the Month: Suno vs Udio: the AI Music Game is Heating Up

Whether you use AI music maker Suno as a fun team-building exercise or tap it for soundtracks to support your professional content, the tool grew more after it leaped into the top 10 last month.

And while their #9 spot is nothing but impressive, competition is coming. As we mentioned last month, upstart Udio had Reddit roaring, and we’re now seeing this in the numbers. 

Udio grew from 9,200 to 11.7 million measured visits in just one month, landing it #19 in our top 100 and the title of the fastest-growing tool in the top 100 with a 127074% gain. 

The Full Top 100

Above are some of the report's highlights, mostly month-over-month changes. For the full top 100, see below.

It remains impressive that we have over 100 AI tools that generate over a million monthly visits. We look forward to continuing to track the progress of AI tools for work in June’s update.

Methodology

We reviewed over 400 AI tools referenced in news, online directories, and lists to create this overview. 

Our starting point is to take usage data from the only standardized source, Similarweb. While no publicly available data source is perfect, Similarweb has scored well in comparative benchmarks. 

Based on their March data, we made our calculations as follows:

• For web traffic, we took the March monthly visits.
• For branded searches (as a proxy for true popularity), we multiplied the percentage of the March web traffic by the percentage of branded searches.
• For the % gained (or lost), we took the March monthly visits and compared it to the February traffic.

We focused on company, enterprise, and individual contributor-focused platforms that bring Generative AI to the workplace. Platforms with an outspoken consumer focus (which may be used at work too, like Character.AI, the number #4 in our AI Top 150.)

Reversely, there may be platforms here that have real utility for work, but consumers also use them. Just look at ChatGPT, which students highly use. We aim to showcase all the great AI technology that can help people work smarter, so we still included such platforms. 

Finally, because of the data source (Similarweb web traffic and branded searches), it also means that huge tools that millions use, but are administered by a few (like most HR tech) are lower in the ranking.

We may have overseen some tools, but we believe that this is a comprehensive selection. If we erroneously left out any platforms, we invite companies to submit their listing for our next report.

We excluded tools that existed before Generative AI unless they were significantly transformed. 

For platforms with fairly significant AI features, like Canva, Notion, and Figma, we applied an estimated percentage of their total traffic that could be attributed to their AI features. 

Often, this is based on statements from the company, like Canva, noting how people have produced over 4 billion AI creations over the past year. Otherwise, we took a standard 5–10% of total web traffic.

Where applicable, like in the case of ChatGPT and Grammarly, we used the 'app' version of the website, which is where the actual usage happens. 

Whenever a platform had multiple use cases besides general GPTs, we listed it under its apparent most-used case, analyzed from search data or sub-URL popularity. This is why Canva is under Image Generators, even though it also has a significant presence in the video and presentation generator categories. (Psst, Canva, feel free to contact us with the real data ;))

All of the above paints an obvious picture: this is very much an imperfect view of AI tools' popularity, driven by our curiosity. 

For some web tools, the proxies we've taken for usage could be solid, as web traffic and search dominance likely reflect how often people use a tool like Quillbot, which all takes place on the website.

For others, like software you can download (Descript, the Office version of Microsoft Copilot) and tools that mostly get used through plugins (Grammarly) or apps, this is only a tertiary indication of potential popularity.

In future months, we'd love to include real usage numbers, as reported by these platforms, to create better rankings.

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