Consumer AI appears to be enjoying a moment. Meta's personal assistant Muse, with its plush mascot Jolly, has been a surprise hit. OpenAI released Dots on Tuesday, chasing the same cartoony personal assistant idea. And the Instinct assistant reached a $10 billion valuation on the strength of its agentic errand-running, which handles booking travel, making restaurant reservations and cancelling subscriptions.
The bull case is straightforward: agentic AI has become reliable enough for everyday tasks, and companies are pitching it to ordinary consumers who are getting genuine value. To investors, it resembles the ChatGPT launch of 2022, with AI opening a product category that was not possible before.
But the economics tell a different story. Frontier labs have grown cautious about consumer AI, not because the technology is insufficient, but because there appears to be a ceiling on how much consumers will pay. The industry has responded by shifting toward the Anthropic model, focused on enterprise contracts and vertical-by-vertical expansion.
Andreessen Horowitz's semiannual State of Markets report, drawing on a PNC research report from this summer, tracked the slowly growing percentage of consumers paying for AI and the slowly growing amount they pay. As of May, 2.2% of consumers were paying for AI, at an average spend of $31 a month. The performance jump from GPT-5.2 to Astra is barely visible on the chart.
Andreessen put a positive spin on the data, saying "it's still so early when it comes to mature AI adoption and utilization." But per-consumer spending remains far below the standard break-even point, using Netflix as the benchmark for a market-saturated online service.