India has consolidated its position as the largest market for artificial intelligence mobile applications. It accounted for 21% of total AI app downloads globally in the first eight months of 2024. More than 2.2 billion downloads of AI apps have taken place worldwide during the period, with the highest contribution coming from India, according to data from Sensor Tower. These included ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, among a few image and video editing tools.
But despite being at the top in downloads, the largest share of Indian users use these apps for free. In-app purchases in North America and Europe account for 68% of the worldwide total revenue from AI applications. Although revenues of AI apps globally have crossed the $2 billion mark this year, India accounts for less than 2% of the total contribution. However, Sensor Tower estimates overall AI app revenue at $3.3 billion in 2024, a staggering 51% growth over the previous year.
For 2023, this saw the explosive growth of AI and chatbot applications‘ downloads increase more than 14-fold to almost 600 million. In 2024, more than 630 million were recorded in just the first eight months of this year, exceeding the total for all of 2023. The OpenAI-developed ChatGPT topped the download chart worldwide, with the AI image editing app Remini, Photoroom AI Photo Editor and Google’s Gemini trailing behind.
Experts predict that more intensive applications of AI will be used for all forms of creation of text, images, and videos to more mundane tasks such as transcription, translation, and voice assistants. It may well be that the next phase in this development could not only come up with advanced versions of the AI system but also could act independently in performing tasks without human input, thereby being called an agentic system.
For instance, an AI agent can automatically book a table at a favorite restaurant for special days or even place orders in accordance with the user’s taste and preference. This development does indeed open up excellent prospects for value chains and monetizable advertising. However, this increasing use of AI at the edge brings new challenges for device manufacturers. Innovations will be required in the form of quicker processors and memory storage for hosting AI models on the device itself.
