Where does consumer AI stand at the end of 2025?

As 2025 draws to a close, the consumer AI landscape has fundamentally shifted. This was the year when major model providers like OpenAI and Google made their most aggressive push into mainstream consumer markets, launching viral products that captured global attention. From ChatGPT's image generation capabilities to Google's Nano Banana Pro, we've witnessed unprecedented innovation in how everyday users interact with artificial intelligence.

Key Takeaways

• ChatGPT dominates with 800-900 million weekly active users, while Gemini has reached 35% of ChatGPT's web scale and 40% on mobile
• Less than 10% of consumers pay for multiple AI products, suggesting a winner-take-most market dynamic
• Image and video models drove the most viral consumer adoption, with Google's Nano Banana and OpenAI's Sora leading the charge
• Product execution and user experience design remain crucial differentiators beyond raw model capabilities
• 2026 is positioned to be a breakthrough year for consumer AI builders as model quality reaches scalable application levels

The Battle for Consumer AI Dominance

The consumer AI market is showing early signs of consolidation. Research indicates that only 9% of consumers are willing to pay for more than one AI assistant from the major providers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor). For most of 2025, fewer than 10% of ChatGPT users even visited competing platforms like Gemini.

ChatGPT currently leads by a massive margin with 800-900 million weekly active users. However, the gap is narrowing rapidly. Gemini has achieved significant scale, reaching approximately 35% of ChatGPT's web usage and 40% on mobile platforms. Meanwhile, competitors like Claude, Grok, and Perplexity each capture roughly 8-10% of the market.

Google's Remarkable Growth Trajectory

The most striking development has been Gemini's accelerating growth. Despite reaching substantial scale, Gemini is growing desktop users at 155% year-over-year, while ChatGPT's growth has slowed to 23% annually. This acceleration coincides with the viral success of Google's image and video models, particularly the Nano Banana series.

The Year of Multimodal Breakthroughs

2025 will be remembered as the year when image and video AI went mainstream. The most viral consumer AI products weren't text-based chat interfaces, but creative tools that generated stunning visual content.

OpenAI's Creative Push

OpenAI's major consumer hits included ChatGPT's image generation capabilities and the launch of Sora for video creation. The company largely kept these features within the ChatGPT interface, maintaining a unified experience while adding powerful multimodal capabilities.

Google's Standalone Strategy

Google took a different approach, launching creative tools as standalone products through Google AI Studio and Google Labs. This strategy allowed for more customized interfaces tailored to specific use cases, moving beyond the traditional chat-in, content-out paradigm.

The breakthrough came with Nano Banana Pro's integration of real-time web search, enabling users to generate historically accurate images and product photography with unprecedented accuracy. As one industry observer noted:

The models have gotten to the level of quality that you can build a real scalable app on top of them. And so the hope is 2026 will be a huge year for consumer builders.

Product Design Makes the Difference

Beyond raw model capabilities, user experience design has emerged as a critical differentiator. The contrast between ChatGPT and Gemini's image generation interfaces illustrates this perfectly.

When users open Gemini, they encounter a blank screen with a popup mentioning Nano Banana, leaving many users unsure how to proceed. ChatGPT, conversely, presents trending themes and suggestions in a TikTok-style interface, making it easy for users to get started and explore capabilities.

These are product nuances that I think makes people actually take the first step to generate it and then once you have it you have character consistency so you keep going.

The Importance of Templates and Trends

Social media platforms like TikTok have demonstrated the power of templates and trending formats. AI companies are beginning to apply these lessons, with platforms like Grok incorporating popular video templates that regularly go viral across social networks.

Looking Ahead to 2026

Several key trends are positioned to shape the consumer AI landscape in 2026:

Enterprise-to-Consumer Crossover

ChatGPT's enterprise usage has grown 8-9x year-over-year. As more professionals use AI tools at work, this exposure is likely to drive increased consumer adoption, creating a powerful flywheel effect.

The App Store Revolution

OpenAI's upcoming app store and SDK launch represents a potential paradigm shift. This platform could become a major distribution channel for consumer AI applications while also transforming how businesses operate across multiple software tools.

Everything Becomes Multimodal

The future points toward "anything in to anything out" capabilities, where users can input text, images, video, or audio and receive intelligent outputs in any format. This evolution will have profound implications for design, content creation, and workflow automation.

Opportunities for Specialized Players

While the major labs excel at foundational models and incremental improvements, they struggle with opinionated standalone consumer products. This creates significant opportunities for startups to build focused, user-centric applications on top of increasingly powerful foundation models.

Recommended Products to Try

For those looking to explore the current state of consumer AI, several standout products deserve attention:

• Crea - Offers access to multiple AI models across different modalities with enhanced interface features
• Perplexity's Comet Browser - Provides an AI-native browsing experience with powerful workflow automation
• Gamma - Transforms text prompts or documents into professional slide decks
• ElevenLabs Reader - Converts written content into natural-sounding audio for on-the-go consumption
• Granola - AI-powered note-taking that improves with contextual understanding over time

Conclusion

2025 established the foundation for mainstream consumer AI adoption, with breakthrough capabilities in image and video generation driving viral growth. While ChatGPT maintains its dominant position, aggressive competition from Google and others is reshaping the market dynamics.

The key insight emerging from this year is that model quality alone isn't sufficient for consumer success. Product design, user experience, and thoughtful feature implementation often matter more than raw capabilities. As we enter 2026, the companies that best understand how to translate powerful AI capabilities into intuitive, engaging user experiences will likely capture the largest share of this rapidly expanding market.

For entrepreneurs and builders, the opportunity has never been greater. With foundation models reaching production-quality levels, the focus is shifting from "can AI do this?" to "how can we make AI do this better for specific users and use cases?" The next wave of consumer AI winners will likely emerge from this more specialized, user-centric approach to product development.