The Top 100 Consumer AI Apps: Who’s Actually Paying?

The most interesting big new trend is in personal agents.

We're in this world where we're so excited by what ChatGPT did with turning things into conversation, and now these agents we can get in our messaging apps that turn them into more conversation. It's this incredible paradigm.

About half of Americans report using AI. Around four and a half percent of US consumers are paying a subscription to an AI product. The top one percent user is spending nine hundred and three dollars per month personally on their personal credit cards on AI.

The reality is people are now building software. They're building these really rich products. They might be using their agents to write some of that code, but when they're delivering this whole experience to a user, it is much more than just a shim on the model.

The run rate that OpenAI has reached through advertising, what does that tell us?

That would previously take a company years and years and years to get to even after launching an ads product. What I'm fascinated to see in terms of the evolution of the ads product is-

Half of Americans now report using AI, but only a small fraction are actually paying for it, and the people who do are spending a lot. In this episode, a16z's Elena Burger sits down with partners Olivia Moore and Josh Elman to unpack the seventh edition of our top one hundred consumer AI apps report. For the first time, the report includes consumer spending data, revealing a very different picture from traffic alone. The biggest spenders are developers, creators, and other power users, with the top one percent spending more than nine hundred dollars a month on AI tools. They also get into the rise of personal agents, how ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are diverging, why advertising could unlock new consumer AI business models, and the categories that remain surprisingly wide open from shopping and entertainment to social and dating.

Welcome to the a16z Podcast. I'm Elena Burger, and I'm joined by Olivia Moore, who's the author of our ongoing Top 100 Consumer AI Apps Report, and Josh Elman on our consumer team. Today, we're digging into the seventh edition of this report, who's paying for AI, why the big assistants are heading in different directions, and whether personal agents can turn everyday errands into the next big consumer business. Team, thanks so much for joining.

Thanks so much for having us.

Olivia, let's just get right into it. I would love to hear your top takeaways from this report.

Yeah. So this is the seventh time we've done this list. The very first time we only ranked all global websites that were AI native by just traffic, like hits on the website. And that worked then because the way that almost everyone was using AI was like a prompt box product in a browser. We've had to evolve that a lot over the last few years as AI expands. So this list is our most expansive yet. We added revenue data for the first time, so we worked with the Abit Data to get specifically consumer card spend data, so not accounting for enterprises or SMBs, and we ranked products by what consumers are actually paying for. I think for me, the biggest takeaways from this report is on a traffic basis, it looks