Hello Friends 👋🏾,

Yesterday, Slack announced the launch of Slack AI, almost 5 months since they first announced on September 6, 2023.

That got me curious as to what the current state of AI is. On one hand, from the news, it seems like AI is everywhere. On the other hand, in my day-to-day experience, I don’t seem to have as many meaningful interactions with AI in products I use and love regularly.

So, I did what I always do when I have an open-ended question: I researched the top 100 apps on the app store to get a sense of where things are at

Of course, app rankings change by the day, so the ones I looked at today may not be precisely the top 100 when you read this, but they should be directionally correct.

Here are my findings:

1. Excluding Meta and Google Apps, of the top 100 apps in the App Store, 12% launched AI-related features.

2. 7% of the top 100 apps announced they are testing AI features but are not broadly available. The median length of an announcement is 4 months.

3. An extra 4% of those companies announced that they are leveraging AI for backend-related work.

4. Only two of the top 100 apps on the app store had AI at the forefront of what the app offers: ChatGPT and Bytedance’s Capcut.
   (Arguably, you could also include Google’s Gemini on this list)

5. Surprisingly, the most common use case for utilizing LLMs was not AI assistants but improving the app’s internal search. AI assistants came in 3rd after ads/targeting-related AI improvement.

6. The majority of new AI features were free.

7. When charging for AI features, the lowest price was $3.99 (Snapchat), and the highest was $169 for TurboTax Intuit Assist.

8. For users charging for AI features, about a third opted to include AI in existing tiers, raising the price by 20% on average. About another third opted to create a new tier for the AI features, with the most common price being $20/month.

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As part of this research, I have tried every AI feature available in every app on the top 100 list on the App Store. Suffice it to say that outside of a couple of notable exceptions, I have found those features to be underwhelming. The speed of adoption, however, is surprising.

More than 20% of the top 100 apps have embraced AI in one shape or another. This figure is probably an underestimate as I would expect some of these companies to be working on/testing AI features but have not made an announcement yet (or maybe they made one, which I missed in my research.)

Overlall I am optimistic.

I am excited to see what the future holds.
Ali Abouelatta