Generative AI Tools for Work Grow 9%, ChatGPT Leads – The AI For Work Top 100: March 2024

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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.

5. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

3. NovelAI: a platform that helps you write entire novels and adds AI-generated images.
4. 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. 
5. 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:

1. 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.