The Whats and Whys of AI Tools

An Introduction to AI Tech

The first question that a lot of people have is, “What are AI tools?” It’s a good question, and one with a fairly complex answer. At the most basic level, we can think of artificial intelligence tools as being pieces of software that use techniques like machine learning to simulate some form of human intelligence.

These days, when we talk about AI tools, we’re usually talking about those that use large language models to automate tasks, generate content and/or analyse data. Productivity enhancement is the name of the game, with the best tools allowing one person to do the work of dozens or even hundreds of people.

There’s been a huge industry transformation over the last few years, with AI tools evolving from being simple chatbots to being some of the most sophisticated computer systems on the planet. They can handle complex reasoning, creative tasks and professional workflows, allowing them to become almost like another member of the team and to disrupt every industry out there, from healthcare to education and from entertainment to manufacturing. 

The Explosion of AI Technology

By now, we all know that AI tools are big business. In fact, the global chatbot market was valued at $15.57 billion in 2025, and its market growth is expected to lead to an insane valuation of $46.64 billion by 2029. This is driven by a number of factors, all of which come together to drive growth rates of 123% year-on-year. 

The interesting thing about the rise of artificial intelligence apps is just how widespread they’ve become in the world of work. Their enterprise adoption is the reason why as many as 95% of all customer interactions are powered by AI as of 2025, and so it’s not just you if you’ve noticed that more and more of your customer service queries seem to be answered by AI.

This has led to huge cost savings for enterprise companies averaging $300,000 annually, as well as ROI metrics (returns on investment) of up to 150-200% for market-leading implementations. It’s no surprise that so many companies are turning to AI as a way to make more money.

The Most Popular AI Chatbots

Why ChatGPT Leads the Market

You can’t talk about the most popular AI tools without talking about ChatGPT. Even though it isn’t a pure AI chat bot, it can do a little bit of everything, which is one of the reasons for the ChatGPT’s dominance over the market.

In fact, ChatGPT has captured 82.7% of the overall market, picking up 46.59 billion visits each year and over five billion monthly users. When you put all of that together, it’s easy to see why it’s growing at 106% year on year. 

Most of this growth has been driven by the latest build’s GPT-4 capabilities, which is a huge step up from previous iterations and which allows the tool to carry out creative problem-solving akin to a human being. That, along with its Microsoft integration, which sees ChatGPT working closely with Azure, Windows, Office and other tools, is why the tool has been able to build up such a strong reputation for market leadership.

OpenAI has shown that they’re committed to making further improvements, too. With regular updates and a range of pricing models (including a free version), there’s a lot to like about ChatGPT.

Why Perplexity AI is Great for Research

Let’s not forget that there are other AI tools like ChatGPT, and each of them dominates in a different area. Perplexity AI is another of the most popular AI tools, and its 8.2% market share is largely as a result of its reputation for accuracy. 

In fact, Perplexity’s ability to combine real-time web searches with conversational AI, along with its developers’ focus on accuracy, makes it the ideal tool if you’re looking for research specialization. ChatGPT will get you an answer, but Perplexity will carry out fact-checking and provide you with source citations.

That’s what gives it such widespread professional appeal, as well as making it popular as an easy-to-use research assistant for students and academics alike. Given that it’s great at processing data in real-time, it can give you the peace of mind that you’re basing your hypotheses on the latest research, but it’s not going to be as good at holding a conversation as a more generic tool like ChatGPT.

Big Tech Companies Enter the Fray

Google’s Gemini AI and Microsoft’s Copilot

No piece on the best AI tools for business would be complete without a look at what the big tech companies have to offer. Take Microsoft Copilot, which has a 4.5% share of the market and which is known for its ability to tap into Microsoft’s platform ecosystems. You can use it to write Word documents, take notes during Teams meetings or even wrap your head around data in an Excel sheet.

Google’s Gemini comes next in the list of the most popular AI software, with a 2.2% share of the market. If you’ve used it, it’s likely because of its enterprise integration with Google Workspace and Android. 

In fact, both tools rely heavily on enterprise use of their productivity features as a key part of their competitive strategies. They know it’s going to be hard to mount a challenge against the market leaders and so they’re trying to capture market share by providing unrivalled convenience and easy access to other software.

Voice AI Solutions and Smart Home Devices

When people talk about AI software, they often forget to think about the specialist AI tools that cover unique use cases, such as those designed for smart home control which rely on natural language processing and voice recognition to listen to users’ commands. If you’ve ever used a Google Home or an Amazon Alexa, you’ve used voice AI.

There are a number of these specialist AI assistants out there, including Google Assistant (which dominates Android), Apple’s Siri (which dominates iOS) and Amazon’s Alexa (which dominates the smart home market). Each of them has built-in voice recognition, as well as mobile integration so that you can access them on your smartphone.

What’s interesting here is that these models don’t compete with text-based AI chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT because they have different interaction modalities. In other words, the questions and prompts you provide to your smart home device are generally very different to those that you enter into ChatGPT.

The Future Competition

Introducing Claude AI and DeepSeek

Now that we’ve looked at where we are today, it’s time to turn to the future. After all, just because ChatGPT is the king today, it doesn’t mean it will reign forever. There are plenty of new AI tools for people to choose from, and each of these emerging competitors has its own specialized positioning that its developers think will make it the next big thing.

For example, China’s DeepSeek has a 1.5% share of the market and is one of the most successful of the latest AI tools, so don’t be surprised if you hear a lot more about it in the years to come. DeepSeek is great at advanced reasoning, and it also has regional advantages for the over 1.4 billion people who call China home.

Then there’s Claude AI, with a 0.9% share, a strong emphasis on safety, and a focus on business applications. Meta’s AI tool is also worth a mention, mostly because it can reach billions of users thanks to its integration with WhatsApp and Facebook. Each one of these platforms could pose a threat to ChatGPT’s dominance thanks to their specialised positioning and the resources that their developers have to throw at them.

The Best AI Tools by Use Case

AI Tools for Productivity and Business

Identifying the best AI-powered tools begins by understanding what you hope to achieve with them. Even when it comes to selecting the best AI tools for business, you need to figure out how you plan to use them. 

There are a ton of different business categories to think about here, so let’s start with content creation, which is arguably the most popular. Here, the top tools are Jasper and Copy.ai, although many marketing teams still turn to ChatGPT for drafting copy. 

For Design, Canva AI and Midjourney come out on top, while DataRobot and H2O.ai are ideal for data analysis. Customer service teams often rely on Intercom and Zendesk AI, and Monday.ai and Notion AI both excel at project management but can’t really handle much else.

And so as you can see, there are a range of different use cases, with most tools specialising in one use case or another. Each of these tools also has different pricing models, although many of them are based on a freemium model. Their pricing also affects their ROI potential, because the more expensive a piece of software is, the harder it is to make it viable for businesses.

AI for Creative Tasks

Given that we’ve already provided an AI tools list for businesses which includes content creation, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of creative applications for AI tools. For example, you can’t talk about the top 10 AI tools without a shout-out for DALL-E, which has built up a stellar reputation throughout the years for its image generation capabilities. Stable Diffusion is pretty good at that, too.

For video creation, Synthesia and Lumen5 will tick most of your boxes, while AIVA and Soundful are both ideal for music production. AI is even showing impressive results when it’s used for code development, as is the case with GitHub Copilot and Replit.

Just like with the business use cases, when AI tools are used for creative tasks, they’re best used alongside human input. All of these models come with limitations, and no amount of computing power can replace human judgement and creativity. It’s important to bear that in mind if you plan to use AI to take on creative tasks like these.

How to Pick the Right Tools

Picking the right AI tool isn’t easy, and there’s no easy answer to the question of what is the best AI app. You need to consider your selection criteria before you decide on which tool to use, factoring in everything from accuracy and cost to speed, security and customer support. You may also want to look at how they can integrate with any other tools that you might be using across different AI websites.

Your evaluation framework should take these factors into consideration, and you should decide where you’re happy to make trade-offs. For example, are you willing to pay more for a faster tool? Perhaps you’re willing to go with a free tool instead of a paid tool at the price of missing out on support or integrations.

You’ll also want to future-proof yourself by thinking about each platform’s approach to data privacy, as well as whether you’re likely to get locked into a single vendor. Scalability considerations are important, too. Will your tool be able to grow with you as you grow, or are you going to need to switch things up six months down the line?

The Future of AI Tools

Ultimately, artificial intelligence tools aren’t just here to stay—they’re going to grow as we grow with them. You can expect their future evolution to lead to multimodal capabilities (the ability to process images, text, video and audio), better reasoning, specialised solutions for individual industries, and improved human–AI collaboration.

If you’re new to using the best AI apps that we’ve covered today, your best bet is to start slow and to begin by using the market leaders. Remember that ChatGPT is perfect for general use, while Perplexity is great at carrying out research. You’ve also got the option of the business-specific tools that we covered and which can be integrated into your professional workflows.

The key is to make a point of ongoing learning and continuous adaptation, switching from one tool to another as needed as the landscape continues to evolve and new features are introduced to the marketplace. Good luck!