a16z’s Olivia Moore on the state of consumer AI
TechCrunch Russell Brandom
Olivia Moore says consumer AI still has room to grow, even as the money looks shaky. Her report finds ChatGPT dominant, but also big gaps and a chance to earn without forcing subscriptions.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Russell Brandom — read the original for the full story.
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Consumer AI may look like a bad business from a distance. The revenue is thin, the costs are high, and OpenAI itself has spent this year moving back toward enterprise. Olivia Moore, who covers consumer AI at Andreessen Horowitz, isn’t buying the doom spiral. She sees the category as early, messy, and still full of openings.
Moore’s new report on the top 100 consumer AI apps shows a market with one giant and a handful of survivors. ChatGPT is still far ahead of the pack. But apps like Suno and ElevenLabs are showing real staying power, which matters more than hype cycles usually do.
The more striking part is what the list leaves out. Moore points to roughly half a dozen consumer categories that AI has barely touched at all: social, dating, marketplaces, retail, travel, finance, and health. That absence is not a footnote. It suggests the biggest consumer AI products may not have arrived yet.
Moore also thinks the business model needs to change. Right now, most AI money comes from subscriptions and token usage, which tends to favor enterprise and prosumer customers. She says many consumers would rather use a product for free, tolerate ads, and only pay if they want the ads gone. That is a very different playbook from asking everyone to pull out a card on day one.
There is also a cost problem. AI services still cost more to run than older internet products like Facebook or Google Search, but Moore says that is starting to improve. OpenAI’s $8-a-month Go plan is part of that shift, and she expects cheaper models and more open-source building to show up in consumer products. For now, though, a lot of the revenue is still coming from coding tools and other technical automation, which looks consumer on the surface and enterprise underneath.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The market keeps calling anything with a friendly interface “consumer AI,” which is how you end up mistaking paid work tools for mass-market products. The real test is whether people who would never expense a chatbot still want it badly enough to use it daily. Until then, the ads and open models crowd looks saner than the subscription maximalists pretending every household needs another bill.
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