AI Companions, Video Generators and Coding Tools Spawn a New App Boom

A new generation of consumer software categories is forming around generative artificial intelligence. From AI companions and conversational search to prompt-based coding tools and video generators, products that barely appeared on app roadmaps two years ago are now attracting millions of users and building their own subscription economies.

New Categories, Built From Scratch

Not long ago, the idea of a consumer paying a monthly subscription to talk to an AI companion felt like something from the distant future. Today, Character.AI ranks among the most-trafficked AI products on the web, with engagement patterns that more closely resemble those of social media than those of traditional software. It is one of several products in the top 50 that represent entirely new consumer categories, with no real predecessor in the app stores of 2022.

CapCut, a video editor, now has 736 million monthly active mobile users and relies on AI for its most popular features, including background removal, AI effects, auto-captions and text-to-video generation. Canva has built its growth engine around its Magic Suite of AI tools. Notion has seen its paid AI attach rate surge from 20% to over 50% in a single year, with AI features now accounting for roughly half of its annual recurring revenue.

These are not startups. They are established products that have been effectively rebuilt around AI capabilities. But running alongside them in the rankings is a separate tier: tools that could not exist without generative AI as their foundation.

AI-native search products like Perplexity. Video generation platforms. Coding assistants. Companion apps. Each represents a category that barely registered on product roadmaps in 2023 and now commands its own user communities, retention dynamics and, in many cases, subscription revenue.

The web top 50 and mobile top 50 tell somewhat different stories, according to a16z. ChatGPT remains the dominant platform, with 900 million weekly active users as of early 2026, up from 500 million over the past year. On the web, it is 2.7 times larger than the No. 2 product, Gemini, and on mobile, it is 2.5 times larger in monthly active users.

On mobile, the list is populated by purpose-built tools serving discrete, high-frequency use cases: image generation, video creation, AI tutoring, companion chat, and language learning augmented by AI. Consumers who have made generative AI a core part of their experience, like CapCut, Canva, Notion, Picsart, Freepik, and Grammarly, are dominating the usage charts.

Consumers Are Reorganizing Their Habits

The behavioral data makes clear this is not a story about future potential. Habits are forming now. More than 60% of U.S. consumers used a dedicated AI platform such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity in the past year, according to PYMNTS research. Over one-third of Gen Z consumers and power users now turn to AI first when starting personal tasks, a clear move away from traditional search and browsing.

The PYMNTS Consumer AI Benchmark, which tracks adoption across 54 personal use cases from shopping to health to travel, found that 54.9% of consumers used generative or agentic AI for at least one personal task in December, with usage highly polarized: 78.3% of power users used AI to discover what to buy, compared to 24.9% of light users.

Menlo Ventures’ State of Consumer AI report adds context on the monetization gap underlying all of this. Consumer AI has become a roughly $12 billion market in about 2.5 years since ChatGPT’s launch, yet with 1.8 billion global users at an average monthly subscription cost of $20, only about 3% pay for premium services. Even ChatGPT converts only about 5% of its weekly active users into paying subscribers. The gap between usage and payment is one of the defining commercial questions in consumer tech right now.

The comparison often made is that AI could become the next smartphone-era platform shift. Mobile did not simply improve existing software. It created entirely new categories, such as ridesharing, social video, and food delivery, that had no desktop equivalent and would not have been viable without the platform. Whether AI-native categories such as companion apps, AI search and agentic commerce follow the same trajectory depends on whether today’s habit formation proves durable. The data, at least for now, suggests it may be heading in that direction.

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