The Battle for AI Isn’t About Models. It’s About Habits

Think about how you shop. Not how you used to shop, but how you actually shop now. You probably do most of it on Amazon. Not all of it. You still go to a specialty running store for shoes, to a wine shop for a bottle for that special occasion dinner, maybe to a boutique for a dress or fancy shoes that need to be exactly right.

But for everyday things, all of the things you need reliably, relatively quickly and without a lot of rigamarole, Amazon is probably your go-to.

It didn’t take long. By the beginning of the millennium, four to five years after it launched, Amazon had secured its spot as the world’s largest online retailer. And it deepened its moat over time as Amazon added more and more to its inventory and more and more sellers with more products to its digital shelves. Books first, then music, then electronics, then apparel, then grocery, then healthcare, then used cars, then prom gowns, bridal dresses and patio furniture.

Eventually the question of where to look first was replaced by a reflex to pop open the app with the lowercase “a” on the home screen.

That reflex is now forming in GenAI. And the story of how consumers are choosing AI models is tracking the same arc.

Understanding one is the fastest way to understand the other. And to predict what the competitive landscape in AI is likely to look like not next quarter, but over the next three to five years. The data is already telling the story. The question is whether the platforms competing in this space are reading it right.

The Habit Is Already Here

A decade ago, conversations at my hair salon over the holidays were about Alexa. Not the countertop Echo device, but the personification of an assistant whose wish would become their command.

In 2026, conversations at those same salons are remarkably similar. But the main character is not Alexa anymore. It is “Chat” or “GPT.” People are asking about the best mattress to buy, whether it is faster to fly or drive from Boston to New York, how to plan the most perfect 13th birthday party and how to assemble a capsule wardrobe for spring. GenAI, and how consumers use it, has gone mainstream.

PYMNTS Intelligence surveyed roughly 15,000 U.S. consumers over the last five months about how they complete 54 personal tasks across nine categories of daily life. The goal was to document which tasks are now AI-first and where AI models have replaced traditional methods of primary consumer interface.

Today, 146 million people, 56% of U.S. consumers, use an AI model to complete at least one personal task. The share of non-users fell from 48% to 44% between October 2025 and February 2026. Mainstream users rose from 30% to 34%. There is a steady, directional move toward more AI use by more people doing more things.

Not a hockey stick. Not a hype cycle. A habit forming at scale, with no signs of slowing down.

The tasks driving this adoption are mundane, even a little tedious. Writing and communication dominate, with editing and drafting emails representing the most common activity. Product discovery follows closely. In fact, finding product links is the single most-performed task across the entire survey sample, the top-ranked activity, and the most stable trend line across the five-month dataset. The traditional method users are leaving behind is Google.

Read More: Why 30 Million US Consumers No Longer Search

More than a quarter of consumers consult AI models for health-related activities, specifically looking up symptoms and researching medications. Daily task lists, meal planning and grocery lists all show gradual upward momentum.

These are not one-off use cases but the daily slog of modern life. AI models are becoming a convenient one-stop shop to address them all.

AI habits are formed at the low-stakes, high-frequency end of the day-in and day-routine, the activities that everyone does more or less daily or multiple times a week. Exactly where Amazon built its lead in online retail.

Amazon won by being the most reliable first stop for the broadest range of everyday needs, and by making the experience of starting there so easy and reliable that choosing something else required a reason not to. It’s the same position ChatGPT is building right now, even as other models emerge to capture more specialized activities.

The More Than One Model Reality

The average active AI consumer now engages with more than two platforms; power users, the 10% of consumers who represent roughly 30 million people, engage with nearly four. On the surface that looks like a fragmented market. It really isn’t.

Think about how most Americans shop. When looking at consumers’ latest retail purchase, 55% shopped at a total of 13 stores. Amazon captures more than 56% of their online spend. The rest goes to a handful of specialists for those one-off, less routine purchases. The boutique with the better shoe selection, the wine shop where someone knows their palate, the specialty fish store worth driving to. It looks like variety. It’s actually much like the shopping hierarchy: one go-to that handles the everyday, and a short list of niche players  that earn their slots by doing something their go-to doesn’t do as well.

The multi-model AI story is the same story. Engaging with multiple platforms is not the same as dividing time equally among them. ChatGPT anchors the stack for every user segment. Other models earn specific slots based on use cases. The consumer using more than one platform is real. Parity of use among those platforms is not.

AI Task Map: Complexity vs. Frequency

What determines where a model earns its slot, and where ChatGPT holds its ground, becomes clear when you map the 54 daily tasks PYMNTS Intelligence tracks against two dimensions: how complex and high-stakes the activity is, and how frequently the consumer performs it.

The Commodity quadrant, high frequency and low stakes, is where habits form and where ChatGPT wins by the simple fact of having been there first and improving over time. Rewording a sentence, finding a product link, building a grocery list. The consumer knows in three seconds whether the answer is right. The cost of the wrong one is a paragraph with too many em dashes or radishes on the grocery list instead of radicchio. It’s where most consumers started their AI-first journeys, and where the critical mass of everyday use still lives.

Read More: How Time Became the Next Great Asset Class

The Trust Gap quadrant, high stakes and lower frequency, is where the market is still being decided. Medication interactions. Loan comparisons. Whether that non-compete clause is enforceable.

Unlike the commodity tasks, the consumer has almost no way to verify the accuracy of the output in real time. Adoption lags here not because consumers don’t value it, but because trust is harder to build when the tasks happen less often and the stakes of getting it wrong can be consequential.

This is where platform differentiation does matter, and where the AI fluency of the user becomes more apparent and adoption-defining.

ChatGPT leads all nine task categories, from 42% in shopping to 60% in writing. it looks different among power users depending on the task. Gemini gains ground in financial and health-related tasks. Claude does in complex document and contract review. Copilot holds where Microsoft Office integration makes specific outcomes more personalized.

We find that power users have already built what the rest of the market hasn’t needed to yet: an AI portfolio with a primary model for everyday tasks and others where they’ve discovered that different models deliver a better outcome.

The more subtle insight is that this behavioral pattern did not emerge from how any of these models set out to build a user base. It emerged from trial, error and engagement over time. Trust grew incrementally, activity by activity, until the habit of starting somewhere became the habit of staying there.

The Invisible Influencer: Consumer vs. Enterprise

The most important force shaping how consumers discover new AI models isn’t visible to them. It isn’t marketing. It isn’t social media. It’s the workplace.

For most consumers, the journey starts the same way Google once did. Personally. A question. A task. Something they need to figure out before the kids wake up or in the middle of a busy day. ChatGPT was the model they found first, because it was there first, so it became the model they trusted first, one low-stakes task at a time.

Read More: Gen AI: The Technology That Broke the Adoption Curve

As that habit deepens, it moves into work. The same model now shows up in higher stakes moments: drafting memos, summarizing documents, preparing for meetings. The personal habit now becomes the professional one. But as the work becomes more complex, and the stakes attached to the output become more related to job performance, the limits of that default start to show. Not enough to displace it, but enough to create a reason to consider something new.

Often, the second model doesn’t show up because the user goes looking for it. It’s introduced. A colleague uses something different. A team adopts a tool for a specific workflow. A company standardizes on a platform. Or the task itself becomes demanding enough that the user is pulled toward something more precise.

This is how models like Claude gain ground. ChatGPT expands outward from the consumer, earning trust in low-stakes, high-frequency tasks and carrying that trust into the workplace. The habit comes first; the enterprise follows.

Claude follows the opposite path. It is encountered in the context of work, where precision matters and the cost of getting it wrong is higher. Contract analysis, code review and complex research are not entry points for casual use. They are reasons to adopt something new. In this case, the enterprise is not the endpoint but the starting point.

Read More: How Leading Enterprises Really Measure Gen AI ROI

These models earn trust in high-stakes moments rather than everyday ones, which is why its growth shows up differently. Not as a default, but as a deliberate choice tied to specific use cases.

What emerges is not a fragmented market, but a structured one. One model becomes the default, the place users start without thinking, while others earn their place more narrowly, tied to tasks where performance justifies the switch. It looks like variety on the surface. In practice, it is a hierarchy.

That is the fork that matters. One path builds from habit outward. The other builds from necessity inward. Every platform in AI is now, whether intentionally or not, choosing which side of that fork to pursue.

Read More: Big Tech Faces the AI Innovator’s Dilemma

Gemini: the GenAI Dog That Hasn’t Barked

Of every company positioned to own the daily AI habit, Google started with the most built-in advantages. Gmail has more than 1.8 billion active users. Google Search handles billions of queries per day. Google Calendar, Maps, Photos and Drive are the embedded infrastructure of daily life for more than a billion people. If habit formation is about being the first stop in a consumer’s day, Google was already there. It had been there for twenty years. And yet, when consumers name the AI model they use most for daily tasks, the answer isn’t Gemini.

ChatGPT started in a different place. A conversational model that says, “ask me anything.” Not the reflex of searching for something already known, but the instinct to think out loud and work through something more complex than a few keywords could capture. Google goes and fetches what consumers have already decided they want. ChatGPT became where consumers go to figure out what to do next with options and detail.

In some ways, the familiarity consumers have with Google may actually be working against Gemini rather than for it. Consumers do not associate Google with the kind of open-ended, generative, think-it-through experience that defines how they are now using AI. They associate it with looking things up with a bunch of links received in return. That association, built over two decades, is sticky in ways that a product rebrand cannot easily overcome. And for many so far, that their experiences with it have proved disappointing.

Read More: Why AI Shopping Is Still Just a Smarter Search Bar

Two Different Tuesday Mornings

So, here’s what a Tuesday morning now looks like for more than half of Americans.

Charlotte wakes up in Baltimore and uses ChatGPT to help draft a text to her kid’s teacher. Before she’s had her first cup of coffee, she’s also asked it to find the best price on a coffee maker and pull the purchase link. By lunch, she’s used it to look up the symptoms of a rash that appeared on her arm. Not to self-diagnose, she’d tell you, just to know whether it’s worth running to urgent care. In the afternoon she used it to rewrite an email requesting a merchant refund, producing a draft that was considerably more diplomatic than her original. By evening, she’s back at the GPT prompt to plan a packing list for next weekend’s camping trip and build a grocery list based on the recipes she wants to make for the week.

Charlotte never once stopped to think about whether she was using an agent, or whether AI was even the right word for what she was using. She just did what she needed to do, at a prompt she already trusted.

Three hours later, Katie wakes up in Seattle and opens Gemini to scan her investment portfolio, asking it to summarize overnight moves in three sectors she’s watching. She switches to ChatGPT for the first draft of a memo she needs to circulate before ten, and to get suggestions for a ten-day European trip in July. At lunch she asks ChatGPT to draft an agenda and fundraising marketing plan for a non-profit board she chairs. By midday she’s in Claude, asking it to explain the meaning of a contract clause her lawyer flagged. She uses Copilot to create a travel itinerary around a business conference in two weeks, because she’s learned it surfaces hotel availability better than the others.

Katie doesn’t think of herself as a consumer using several AI tools. She just thinks of herself as someone who uses the right tool for the job: a primary model for most things, specialists for the tasks where they perform better.

Two consumers. Same Tuesday. Very different relationships with AI, and with the platforms competing for their attention.

The Habit Hardens

Let’s end how we started. With shopping.

You probably didn’t sit down one day and decide that Amazon would be your default for everyday essentials. You just used it. Then used it more. Then stopped noticing you were making a choice. The habit formed because of the friction you stopped experiencing. The comparison shopping you no longer bothered with, the store you used to drive to that now feels like too much. Amazon didn’t win your loyalty. It won your reflex by being convenient and reliable and trusted.

Read More: The First Chatbot Consumers Try May Be the One They Stick With

That is exactly what is happening in GenAI right now, and the window for platforms to shape habits may be narrower than most of them seem to appreciate.

Consumers are not evaluating AI models. They are using them. And with each use, the mental calculus of where to start shrinks a little more. Charlotte in Baltimore isn’t going to wake up one morning and reconsider her relationship with ChatGPT. She is just going to keep opening the app. The task will change. The prompt will change. The reflex won’t. As long as the output remains valuable.

For the platforms competing in this space, this is both the opportunity and the threat.

The opportunity is that habits at this stage are still forming. The commodity quadrant is not fully locked, the trust gap quadrant is wide open, and the AI-fluent consumer who becomes a power user is still building her AI stack. The threat is that every day a consumer completes a task with a model and walks away satisfied, that model gets a little harder to displace.

Amazon’s lesson was not that it built the best online store. It was that it built the most reliable first stop, across the broadest range of everyday needs, before its retail competitors understood that the first stop was the thing worth competing for. By the time they did, the habits were already set.

The GenAI market is in the first few innings of that same game. ChatGPT holds the first-stop position for the everyday. Claude is earning its ground at the high-stakes end, task by task, credential by credential. Gemini is still looking for the moment when its structural advantages convert into behavioral ones. Copilot has inroads for the tasks where Microsoft integration produces an outcome worth switching for.

What happens next will be determined less by product releases and more by how habits are formed and how embedded that reflex is in everyday life. And whether the platforms understand that they aren’t just competing for users, but for the order in which those users show up at their prompt.

The consumer who opens ChatGPT before she’s had her coffee isn’t likely to be pulled away by a better feature set alone. If she changes her behavior at all, it will be because another model earns a specific role in her routine. Much the way a great wine shop earns its place, not by replacing Amazon, but by being worth the detour. That is the competitive reality of the next three to five years. Not a single winner. Not a fragmented free-for-all. A hierarchy, with one anchor handling the everyday and a short list of niche players competing for attention at the edges.

Until NEXT time.

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PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, healthtech and real-time payments firms, including a non-executive director on the Sezzle board, a publicly traded BNPL provider.

She founded PYMNTS.com in 2009, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.

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