Apps Set To Give Way To Assistants: How ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI May Reshape Our Digital Lives

By 2027, mobile app usage will decrease by as much as 25% due to artificial intelligence-powered assistants. This trend will be driven by smartphone users who will increasingly turn to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI, Apple Intelligence and others. Notably, this will replace apps for many functions, new research by Gartner Inc. shows.

In addition to the impact of AI assistants, apps will be consolidated across separate brands and companies, creating mobile app partnerships or consortiums to reach more users per app at scale and defray the cost of creation and maintenance, Gartner added.

Brands with low app engagement and retention will probably be the first to be affected. However, app development expenses will go down, which will benefit brands that aren’t too dependent on using apps to generate revenues.

Other brands may be impacted by the disintermediation of users turning to AI assistants for services, the research noted. The ability to contact fewer consumers through mobile push notifications and the loss of first-party data collection will also follow from the decline in app users.

By 2026, over one-third of web content will be created for the purposes of gen AI-powered search, according to Gartner estimates. Also, the average CMO allocated almost a quarter of their digital marketing budget to search, according to Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend Survey.

Other than end users directly visiting a website, search currently drives more traffic to the average commercial enterprise website than any other referral source. Given this, a loss of search-driven traffic due to algorithmic shifts by major search engines would result in tangible, negative commercial impact to organisations.

It is becoming increasingly challenging for CMOs to maintain their reach and engagement among consumers. This is especially true as consumers shift their tech and media behaviours away from social media, to other platforms and subscription-based channels. 

As a result, by 2028, digital marketers will move 30% of their paid social budget to support advertising and partnerships on subscription-based channels. Closed group communities and subscription channels offer an alternative for social media-weary consumers and content creators who want to do more than feed the algorithm, according to Gartner.

So, what is the situation now? Current AI models, such as large language models, cannot autonomously execute tasks and adapt in complex environments. However, as new levels of intelligence are added, new AI agents are poised to become more capable and reliable as brands seek to address customer-facing use cases. Hence, Gartner estimates that by 2027 itself, 85% of customer data will be collected from automated interactions or those led by AI agents.

Amongst all this, marketers will have to decide when and how to trust AI agents to act in important areas on behalf of the brand and customers, the research noted.