Following our AI Top 150, we spent the past few weeks analyzing data on the top AI platforms for work. This report shares key insights, including the AI tools you should consider adopting to work smarter, not harder.
While there is understandable concern about AI in the work context, the platforms in this list paint a different picture. It shows a future of work where people can do what humans are best suited for while offloading repetitive, digital tasks to AI.
This will fuel the notion that it’s not AI that takes your job but a supercharged human with an army of AI tools and agents. This should be a call to action for every working person and business leader reading this.
So, with that said, let’s dive in:
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Generative AI for Work Keeps Growing – Nearly Hitting 3 Billion
Measured from December to February, Generative AI tools for work kept growing. Even though February was slightly shorter, the Top 100 grew by 52 million visits globally.
In total, the Top 100 tools booked 2,909 billion visits versus 2,857 billion in December. Normalized for the number of days, this means a 9% increase in just two months, dispelling any myths that Generative AI use is declining.
The Top 10 Gen AI for Work platforms include expected (ChatGPT and Gemini) but also unlikely winners, including:
- Number 3: Canva, which went big on AI with images, videos, and presentations. The Austrlia-based design platform shared it had seen 4 billion Gen AI creations on the platforms. Canva grew another 7% in the last two months.
- Number 4: Writing tool Quillbot is ranked fourth with 56 million monthly visits, with a highly popular paragrapher, grammar checker, and summarizer in several languages. The platform is placed six spots higher than competitor Grammarly.
- Number 5: Perplexity.AI: Look, with almost 50 million monthly visits, the story of Perplexity as a competitor to Google (83 billion monthly visits) isn’t quite becoming a reality yet, but the modest 9% growth means more people are catching on to this “LLM meets Search Engine – Including Sourcing” offering.
- Number 6: GitHub Copilot helps 1.3 million programmers code better and faster – to the tune of a 50% increase in productivity. A newly launched enterprise version even uses companies’ code and knowledge bases to provide code suggestions.
- Number 7: Unique among others, Poe by Quora founder Adam D’Angelo lets users chat with any of the major GPTs. Like Character.AI, it also allows people to create their own bots, and over one million have done so, generating 44 million visits a month.
- Number 8: Image generator Leonardo AI goes way beyond Dall-E and others, offering designers tools to fine-tune their creations, such as size, style, and output type. Used to create 4.5 million images a day, Leonardo can be trained on the user’s own dataset. It gained the most of all Top 10 tools, growing 25% since December. (And, like Canva, it’s from Sydney!)
- Number 9: Grammarly, is the second writing aid after Quillbot and puts the power of Generative AI into everyone’s hands. Drafting email replies, revisiting text, and writing copy, Grammarly does it all. Grammarly saw traffic increase by 11% to 36,2 million monthly since December.
- Number 10: Rounding out the Top 10 is Midjourney. While the platform can generate impressive and photorealistic visuals, the Discord interface means there’s quite a learning curve. Still, the tool must be popular, with 17.4 million visits to the website alone (the actual usage is on Discord, which can’t be measured).
From researching and writing to generating movies, these top 10 AI platforms are transforming the way we work. As Bain research has shown, AI for Work can make people up to 41% more productive, and over 80% of generative AI users agree.
These kinds of platforms fuel the idea that “AI won’t take your job, but someone with AI will.” People and organizations that embed AI in the flow of work will see significant productivity gains, while enjoyment will shoot up, too.
And that’s even more true once we look beyond the top 10, especially in platforms that are tailored to more specific roles and use cases:
GPTs lead the charge, ChatGPT keeps growing
As we saw in January’s AI Top 150 (which also included consumer applications), general-purpose “GPTs” like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot lead the charts. And, with a wide margin: 70% of traffic in the AI for Work Top 100 is from only six GPTs.
These GPTs were responsible for 2,032 billion visits and 114 million searches. ChatGPT remains the undisputed leader, with 1,626 billion visits – 80% of the category.
In fact, according to the Similarweb data we used for the analysis, ChatGPT was the only major GPT that gained in traffic, increasing by 5% between December and February. In contrast, Google Gemini lost 7%, while Microsoft built up significant traffic on a dedicated Copilot AI search website (Bing, including Copilot, lost 4% since December.)
Anthropic’s Claude ranks a distant fifth and saw traffic decrease by 2% between December and February. However, it recently released its new Opus 3 model, which, according to recent tests, beats ChatGPT-4. We may soon see more prominent rankings for the platform.
Pi, the more human-sounding chatbot from Inflection, which recently sold most of its assets to Microsoft, is the 6th GPT chat platform and #44 in the Top 100. It seems like the masses won’t miss it too much, as the Microsoft-Inflection acquisition creates uncertainty for Pi’s future.
The recently launched Mistral “Le Chat” doesn’t register in the Top 100, ranking #121 with 606,135 monthly visits in February 2024, with 284,277 coming from branded searches.
The platform seems especially popular in Russia (18% of traffic), France (16%), and Columbia (11%.) This contrasts with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, which all have the US as their major market.
Image Generators are the Most Popular Category – By a Stretch
Image generators and editors represent 21 of the Top 100 AI platforms for work, the largest category by a mile. And without a doubt, this number would have been much higher if we had included more consumer-type AI image platforms. Only Video Generators come close, with 12 entrants in the Top 100.
In the Image category, three Top 10 entrants lead the charge: Canva, Leonardo (which grew by a very impressive 25% in the past months), and Midjourney.
Below, that, we find:
- CutOut Pro, a background remover tool run by the Hong Kong-based team at LibAI, which earns its place on this list with features like prompt-to-image, background-from-text, and sketch-to-image. The site grew 18% since December, the fastest after Leonardo.
- PIXLR, an online photo editor, AI image generator, and AI design suite that offers several Adobe-type features like generative fill and expand, all in a simple online interface.
- Speaking of Adobe: Adobe Firefly, its online generative AI platform, is number six on this list, losing about 7% of its monthly audience since December. The $10-for-250-images deal may have something to do with this.
- Photoroom, similar to CutOut and PIXLR, offers often-used features like background removal, backdrop creation, and Gen AI-powered expansions, all in a simple interface used by brands like Shopify, Netflix, and Bulgari.
- Ideogram, which was launched with the mission to “make people more creative through generative AI,” and focused on rendering text correctly. A fatal flaw in other tools at the time, they have recently caught up, potentially creating the 30% drop in traffic.
- Playground, a platform that lets people “create and edit images like a pro, without being one,” for example, by letting them combine real and AI-generated images into new creations.
- PicWish, a platform similar to CutOut, PIXLR, Photoroom, and Playground in that it offers new-school image editing capabilities in a user-friendly online interface.
In short, the category has some standout entries and many similar platforms, especially when we look beyond the top 10. Look for a few M&As in this category or players who will fizzle out in the next 6-12 months.
Given this, as a company, you’re best off betting on one of the bigger vendors in this space, like Canva, that can guarantee sustainability and have your data protection in mind.
Here’s the full top 10 for reference:
Highlights from Other Categories
While widely present in the Top 100, Image Generators are far from the only standouts in this list. Below are the four other top 5 categories and some of the best tools within them:
Video Generators & Editors
Following image generation and editing by some margin, its video sibling is popular, too. No less than 14 tools in this category made it into the top 100, with another 13 in the Top 101-300, which we also track.
First, we must acknowledge that the Canva AI Video maker is likely the number one in the category by a long shot. However, since our data sources don’t report which tools within a domain get used and how much, we’ve (like with other platforms that have multiple tools) put all Canva traffic toward its most popular tool, the AI Image Generator.
Keeping this in mind, the remaining top entrants in the AI Video Generators & Editors break down as follows:
- Runway, the groundbreaking Generative AI video generator that powers creators and Hollywood producers with AI-created videos. Companies can train the model on their own imagery.
- Veed, known as the “Canva for video,” uses AI to make it even easier for professionals to create and edit videos for social media, learning & development, and more.
- Invideo.io, a ‘video copilot’ that lets you create entire videos from a single prompt. From this, the platform generates a script, creates scenes, adds voiceovers, & tweaks the video at the user’s command. Invideo is growing fast, adding 22% from December.
- Opus Clip, a tool that wowed us from the first use by taking long videos and magically turning them into great social content. It uses AI to find the clips with the most viral potential and even shows you why.
- HeyGen, a video generator with ‘digital spokespeople’. And wow, they have come a long way since the first (already very impressive) demo! Create instructional videos or marketing materials from a simple prompt. HeyGen also partnered with Lattice to launch AI-generate onboarding materials.
Outside of the top 5, we find VidNoz, similar to HeyGen and the fastest-growing platform in this list, adding 73% since December, at 6. Furthermore, we see AI editing platform Media.IO at 7, collaborative editing platform Kapwing, and unicorn Synthesia at number 10.
Coming in at number 8, Pika is a highly impressive prompt-to-video platform that raised $55 million to create videos from a photo or even another video, and convert them into different styles, like cartoons. Pika also offers features similar to Firefly’s generative fill for video assets.
For reference, here are the top 10 AI video generators with their respective gains or losses since December:
Outside of the Top 10, but in the Top 100, we find FlexClip (#84) and course creator platform Pictory (#93.)
Writing & Editing
Does it surprise us that writing and editing tools are less popular than image and video editors? Yes.
However, while the Writing category comprises 10 out of the Top 100 AI for Work tools versus 14 Video Generators, they generate more traffic: 4% of all traffic goes to writing tools, double that of video generators.
This means that the fewer writing platforms generate more traffic each. This is largely driven by two massive category leaders: paraphraser Quillbot (the overall number 4 tool) and Grammarly (number 9.) These two platforms generate 93,3 out of 121 million monthly visits in the category.
Here’s how the full top 5 breaks down:
- Quillbot: stands out in the category as an incredibly accessible tool that gets you results quickly. The premium plan lets you set several ‘voices’ to transform writing in your most-used styles quickly.
- Grammarly: is a highly versatile platform that is deeply integrated into any application or browser window where you may be writing. Its pricing is on the more expensive side, but for frequent writers (aren’t we all—from social posts to emails), it is still well worth it.
- NovelAI: a platform that helps you write entire novels and adds AI-generated images.
- WriteSonic: this multifaceted platform helps you create long-form copy in just a few clicks, coaches you on SEO impact, and turns it into shorter social media posts, among other things.
- Writer.com: an enterprise platform for brand-approved writing that brings together all teams in an organization, from customer service to sales outreach. Like Grammarly for companies, it digs from a central knowledge base and writing guidelines to ensure every customer touchpoint aligns with the brand and contains the most up-to-date product information. It’s worth mentioning that most of the usage of Writer.com will occur outside of the website, making its top 5 position even more impressive.
Further in the top 10: popular writing (and image generator) platform Simplified (#6), marketing-focused Copy.AI (#7), Wordtune (#8), Jasper.AI (#9), and publishing coach ProWritingAid (#10.)
For the full top 10, see the chart below:
One of the original AI writing platforms, Rytr, now places just outside of the Top 100 at #104.
Research
Large Language Models, which power AI tools, hold massive amounts of data, making great research tools.
Of course, users need to be aware of hallucinations and what to do about them, but otherwise, it’s clear to see why so many research tools do so well, making it the 4th most popular category with 9 out of the Top 100 tools.
In the Top 5, we find:
- Perplexity: With almost 50 million visits per month, Perplexity is becoming a popular option for research. It combines the strengths of ChatGPT (get a summary of the information it holds on a topic) and Google (links you can follow to get more detailed information). It's no surprise that Perplexity is the most popular tool in this category and the #5 overall Generative AI for Work platform.
- Liner: Liner is named after the yellow marker you used to highlight text in documents. In recent years, it’s added significant AI capabilities, including a research tool and the ability to retrieve information from your documents by speaking to Liner. (See a note on Liner’s ranking below.)
- You.com: You is like Perplexity, but with the added feature of training AI agents to do more work for you. However, the proposition and execution seem to be less compelling than Perplexity, as You receives 80% less traffic and 90% less branded searches and has declined 18% since December.
- ChatPDF: Upload any PDF and ask questions about its content. Yes, ChatGPT does this too, but sometimes it’s nice to have a dedicated (and free) website to do so. And to much excitement of people tired of chatting, the company just launched CallPDF, which lets you SPEAK to your documents. I know! The future is here!
- Consensus: One of our favorite platforms, Consensus grew an impressive 83% in just two months and is now the #5 research tool and #75 AI for Work platform. Consensus goes beyond Perplexity and You by diving deep into academic papers while reducing hallucinations, making it a more reliable research partner.
In places five through ten, we find four “AI for PDF” tools: Typeset (#6, with a focus on science papers), Humata (#7), PDF AI (#8), Ask Your PDF (#10), alongside YouTube Summarized at #9.
Consensus-type tool Scite falls just outside of the Research Top 10 and the overall Top 100, but worthy of a mention.
A note on Liner: while A16Z (based on the same data) had Liner as the number 4 overall Generative AI platform, our understanding is that a lot of the web traffic leading to its Top 5 ranking is from loading Liner automatically in the web browser, not from proactive usage.
Like all platforms, we calibrated web traffic with branded searches as a proxy for true popularity amongst web users. Here is where Liner falls short: it’s the 33rd most-searched-for platform, and according to Ahrefs data, Liner only generates around 10,000 monthly searches in the US - its largest market, according to Ahrefs. In contrast, almost 20 million people search for ChatGPT, and almost 5 million search for Grammarly, the #10 of the Top 100.
This is why Liner is ranked #18 on our list while still holding the number two spot among AI research platforms.
The full Top 10 reads as follows:
Audio Generators
Photo, video…. All we’re missing is audio.
Good news: the final of the five leading categories, Audio Generators, accounts for 8 of the Top 100 platforms with over 48 million monthly visits and 9 million searches.
Steady at the helm is pioneer ElevenLabs, founded less than two years ago and has since been valued at $1.1 billion. It lets you upload voice recordings to create an audio clone of yourself.
Great for podcasters and other creators, the platform is soon expanding to sound effects and already cleverly hijacked the OpenAI Sora news by providing AI-generated videos with sound:
Further in the top 5 AI audio generators:
2. Suno, a platform that lets ‘anyone make great music.’ In just a few seconds, it turns a prompt (“create a Justin Bieber-style pop song about AI in the workplace”) into a song of up to two minutes. Play around with it and be amazed.
3. Speechify, a set of tools that can turn text into any voice, including celebrity ones. It also offers AI voice dubbing, voice cloning, and transcriptions.
4. Natural Readers, a similar but more focused platform dedicated to turning text into audio.
5. VoiceMod, a helpful tool that changes your voice, is popular with content creators.
Outside of the Top 5, we find Murf (#6), PlayHT (#7), and LOVO (#10), all platforms similar to ElevenLabs, Soundraw (#8), and AIVA (#9), more tools for creating music with AI.
The full Top 10 of AI Audio Generators looks as follows:
Other Noteworthy Platforms
So far, we’ve covered almost 60 tools, but what about those that didn’t make it into one of the most popular categories? Below are noteworthy platforms not part of the Image, Video, Audio, Research, and Writing categories:
#6: GitHub Copilot. Microsoft’s coding copilot was last reported to have over a million paying users across 20,000 organizations who initiated more than 1.9 billion chats. As mentioned above, it helps engineers to be up to 50% more productive by giving code suggestions, reviewing work, and fixing errors.
#12: Hugging Face. Part of the Programming & Coding category, Hugging Face is a playground for AI makers. The community site lets builders launch and test AI models and create their own apps on top of LLMs. This incredibly popular offering makes Hugging Face the #12 platform with almost 20 million monthly visits, up 6%.
#19: Gamma AI: While losing 40% since December, Gamma remains a top 20 AI for Work platform. The tool allows users to generate entire PowerPoints with a simple prompt and offers a handy ChatGPT-like assistant to make edits quickly. All this is quickly making Gamma our favorite AI presentation generator.
#35 Figjam AI: Like Canva, GitHub, Bubble, and Notion, Figma profits from having a platform and user base that is the perfect launchpad for AI offerings. In this case, it’s embedded Generative AI features in FigJam, Figma’s brainstorming tool, which is popular with teams practicing remote work.
#42: Otter AI: A highly competitive category, many meeting AIs, including Fireflies, Read, and Meetgeek, barely (or no longer) make it in the top 100. This makes Otter’s #42 placement extra impressive. On top of that, the platform grew by 32% since December and now sees 5 million monthly visits and over 500,000 branded searches.
#51: Looka. How many people create brand identities? Apparently, enough for Looka to be the 51st most popular AI for Work tool. Looka takes prompts and turns them into logos and full-fledged brand identities. Based on a trial with our brand name, our designer has nothing to worry about, but for the many companies that don’t have one, Looka could be an attractive tool.
#69: Taskade: Leading the charge in AI productivity tools, Taskade blew us away. The platform doesn’t just offer AI features to build out project plans but impressively offers AI Agents (similar to GPTs on ChatGPT) that you can train to do the work for you. A one-person unicorn is coming, indeed.
#84: Motion: Promising to make you 137% more productive, Motion plans your tasks and manages your schedule for you. Combining an executive assistant for arranging meetings and a task planner to constantly (re)schedule your most important tasks helps you get much more out of your day. (We didn’t try it since you have to put your credit card in just for the trial.)
#96: Gong. While we near the bottom of the Top 100, the platforms aren’t getting any less impressive. Take Gong, which turns the typical AI notetaking into a powerful tool for sales representatives. It identifies the next steps and key customer insights and reminds about follow-ups.
Meet the Next ChatGPT: The Fastest Gainers
Who’s the next ChatGPT? We studied the fastest climbers in and beyond the top 100, as measured by site traffic increases between December 2023 and February 2024.
Fastest Gainers in the Top 100: from Copilot to YouTube Summaries
The fastest climbers in the Top 100 include:
- Microsoft’s dedicated home for Copilot (also still on Bing.com) – copilot.microsoft.com. (If only we could get 5 cents for every AI tool rebrand!)
- Business name generator Namelix, which uses AI to…. generate business names. (Image: some of the names it suggested for us.)
- Research paper chatbot Consensus, covered above in the Research section.
- Coding companion Blackbox AI, which includes a feature to create your own AI coding assistant, similar to GPTs on ChatGPT or agents in Taskade.
- Vidnoz, the ‘digital spokesperson generator’ mentioned in the Video section.
- Executive assistant AI Motion, as covered in “Noteworthy Platforms.”
- Tactiq, a meeting AI notetaker that allows you to save common prompts – a light version of agents.
- Taskade, also featured in the Noteworthy section.
- Fireflies, a meeting note-taker.
- YouTube Summarizer Eightify.
Below is the full Top 10:
Beyond the Top 100:
For the next batch of AI Tool success stories, we looked at the fastest-growing tools with over 100,000 monthly visits as their base in December outside the Top 100. Adopt them now so you can say: “oh, I’ve been using that platform for months!”
In this category, we find:
- Kome AI, which provides instant summaries for articles, webpages, news, and YouTube videos with ease.
- Airgram, a meeting assistant that provides live transcriptions in multiple languages. [Update in October 2024: no longer around.]
- Glean, an enterprise search and knowledge management platform that answers employees’ questions based on company data.
- StoryDoc, an AI presentation generator that makes presentations interactive and engaging.
- Dorik, which creates full websites from a simple prompt, including AI-Generated Content and multi-language support.
- Fathom, an AI notetaker that can automatically update CRMs and task managers like Zapier and Hubspot (that’s cool!)
- Framer AI, similarly lets Framer users prompt new websites and uses Generative AI to create copy aligned to brand guidelines.
- Shortwave, which bills itself as the ‘smartest email app on the planet,’ gives back time to its users with GPT-powered search and AI-drafted replies across multiple languages.
- Krisp, an AI-powered assistant for meetings and calls, with a unique Noise Cancellation proposition.
- Sharly, which summarizes and answers questions about over 50 types of documents and adds collaborative features like a team or client knowledge base.
Here’s the full chart for reference:
The Full AI for Work Top 100
All of the above showcases the various strong platforms in the Top 100. So, what does that Top 100 look like?
Below is the full chart:
The Bottom Line: AI for Work Top 100
If you were like us and thought the world of AI started and ended with ChatGPT, hopefully, this data review will open your mind.
With so many tools, some tailored to specific roles and workflows, it’s no wonder that OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he expects a one-person unicorn to be possible.
Let me know which platforms you end up using. Similarly, if you find an AI for Work tool that’s missing from this overview, please reach out.
Let’s make work more human by offloading repetitive, non-value-adding tasks to AI. It’s one way we can create a happier future of work.
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 data, we made our calculations as follows:
- For web traffic, we took the February monthly visits.
- For branded searches (as a proxy for true popularity), we multiplied the percentage of the February web traffic by the percentage of branded searches.
- For the % gained (or lost), we took the December 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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