Dive Brief:
- Declining search traffic to the most popular AI categories at software marketplace and review website G2 shows enterprise buyers are more AI savvy, according to Matthew Miller, research principal, AI, automation and analytics.
- Search traffic for the top 5 AI software categories continuously decreased month over month from August 2023 to January 2024, according to G2 data shared with CIO Dive. The top 5 AI categories during this period were AI writing assistants, chatbots, text-to-speech tools, image recognition software and intelligent virtual assistants.
- AI writing companions had the steepest drop in monthly traffic, falling 81% during the same timeframe. Search traffic for chatbots fell by nearly 60% between November 2023 to January 2024.
Dive Insight:
AI tools were the fastest-growing software products across G2’s website last year as enterprises experimented with tools, weighed pros and cons and began crafting strategies. But search trends are beginning to stabilize as adoption advances.
“There was a huge increase not too long ago, but now we’re seeing a little bit of a leveling off,” Miller said. “Overall, there’s this understanding that they’re not just trying to find some sort of AI magic bullet.”
Even with the hype surrounding generative AI last year, enterprises often ran into roadblocks while trying to pinpoint value-adding use cases. But with a year of experimentation under their belts, leaders are much more knowledgeable about what it takes to successfully and responsibly adopt the technology — and what to avoid.
Buyers are now turning to search for solutions with more specific capabilities that align closer with business outcomes, Miller said.
More than half of executives say AI will help cut costs in 2024, and nearly three-quarters increased tech investments this year to boost productivity, according to a Boston Consulting Group report published last month.
The decline in search traffic can also be attributed to early adopters who have likely already selected tools and are mostly past the market analysis phase, according to Miller.
Over the past year, early adopters have taken a zealous approach to adopting AI tools, from leaning on add-ons from existing vendors to building out capabilities internally.
“These capabilities are now just part of the software out there,” Miller said. “For the sellers, in some ways, it’s pushing them to make sure that they’ve got the right solutions with the right capabilities as well as integrations to existing software.”
