Top 20 AI Software of 2024: Best Picks for Business Users – eWeek

These top AI software solutions enable companies of all sizes to gain great competitive advantage with artificial intelligence.
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The demand for artificial intelligence software (AI) has increased significantly in recent years, and organizations of all sizes are adopting artificial intelligence to stay competitive. During the past couple of years that I’ve spent researching this type of technology, I’ve discovered a range of incredible AI tools, and at what often feels like a moment’s notice, these tools optimize their features and introduce new capabilities to meet the growing needs and demands of users.
I’ve analyzed various artificial intelligence software solutions for different use cases — primarily focusing on business scenarios — to help you determine the best and most relevant AI applications for your needs. This list considers software from AI companies that serve both technical and non-technical teams. Let’s take a look.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The top AI software solutions on the market today cover a broad spectrum of industries and specific use cases. To provide a point of comparison across these categories, we’ve summed up the key characteristics and strengths of each of our top choices in the table below.
Cloud and other technology companies are racing to develop AI tools and solutions both for their customers and internal use cases. To meet these goals, a growing number of business users are investing in AI software that helps them build their own models, manage their training data, and govern all aspects of the modeling lifecycle for better outcomes. These are the best solutions I’ve found for model building and governance:

Best for Data Scientists & Azure Users
Azure Machine Learning Studio is an AI solution designed to help ML engineers and data scientists train and deploy models and manage the MLOps lifecycle. With this tool, users can create a model in Azure Machine Learning or use a model built from an open-source platform, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or scikit-learn. They can also design and build custom models and algorithms to gain insights from data, deploy them in production, and monitor the models’ analytics results as they evolve.
Azure Machine Learning Studio offers several features that simplify data science and machine learning. These include automated machine learning, model management, and interactive visualizations. The Studio version of the tool is designed to be user-friendly and low-code/no-code, so in some ways, its capabilities are limited; the greater Azure Machine Learning environment offers support for more complex use cases and experienced developers who want to go further with their models in Azure.
Azure Machine Learning Studio (classic) is available in two tiers: Free and Standard.
The standard plan costs $9.99 per ML studio workspace per month, or $1 per studio experimentation hour.
Production Web API pricing works like this:

Best for Collaborative Data Workflow Management
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is an innovative solution that combines the strengths of Databricks’ data lakehouse storage infrastructure with several different AI and data workflow management features, including a comprehensive layer of AI, data, and analytics governance capabilities. Many enterprise teams are opting for this solution to develop and manage all aspects of AI technology for their businesses, as it is one of the best tools on the market for prepping and getting to know your data at all levels.
Built on the Databricks open data lakehouse foundation, the Data Intelligence Platform combines the strengths of a lakehouse with generative AI to create its trademark Data Intelligence Engine, which quickly learns and operates in your organization’s data style and lingo. The platform also includes a range of capabilities to support business intelligence, ETL, data warehousing, data analytics, orchestration, and data science. Most recently, Databricks updated the platform with a new addition: DBRX, an open LLM that is now available to all users and is competitive with tools like GPT-3.5.
The Databricks platform itself appears to be “free,” but to actually do anything with it, you’ll need to pay for DBU-based product usage. Pricing looks like this, but can be variable, depending on selected cloud, region, volume discount privileges, and other factors:

Best for AI & ML Model Deployment
Amazon SageMaker is an ML-focused platform from one of the largest and most successful tech companies in the world. With its impressive network of third-party partners and solutions, as well as the tools and capabilities directly available from Amazon and AWS, users can effectively manage the model lifecycle through deployment in several different formats, including edge device, geospatial-data-driven, and embedded AI deployment.
SageMaker includes a diverse array of tools and features to help users prepare their data, build out their models, train models, deploy models, and govern their models, all with supportive features for end-to-end ML. It is one of the best platforms for dedicated deployment support. The platform’s dedicated deployment capabilities include Model Deployment; Pipelines, for CI/CD-driven workflow management; and Edge, to help users learn how to deploy and manage models that run on edge devices on an ongoing basis.
Some SageMaker features and capabilities may be available in a limited format through AWS Free Tier. Otherwise, pricing is typically based on per-hour usage and is highly variable, depending on the global region in which you operate and the version of the tool you select. Sample pricing in the United States may look like this for Amazon SageMaker Studio Classic:

Best for Rapid Model Building & Model Lifecycle Management
DataRobot AI Platform is an automated, end-to-end platform for developing and deploying AI models, helping organizations process and analyze data to derive important business insights. The platform provides tools and resources for data science teams to build, tune, and deploy models, and it allows users to explore models from various algorithms to select the best-fit models for their datasets. The DataRobot AI Platform can be deployed as multi-tenant SaaS, single-tenant SaaS, self-managed VPC, or self-managed on-premise. It is a helpful tool for teams — including inexperienced teams — to get up and running with AI models quickly, as many of its features are automated and unified for both generative and predictive modeling.
The platform includes features for deployment and operations, AI governance and management, and model building and fine-tuning. Additionally, the platform comes with particularly user-friendly visuals that are color-coded and clearly labeled.
DataRobot doesn’t advertise specific pricing on its page. However, they do mention two plans: Essential 9.0 and Business Critical 9.0. More specific pricing information is available upon request.

Best for AI Governance & Explainability
IBM watsonx is a new generation of Watson’s AI products and solutions that span across AI model-building, open data lakehouse storage, AI governance, conversational AI chatbots, task and efficiency management, and code generation and assistance. It is a highly modular platform, with users getting to choose between watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, watsonx.governance, watsonx Assistant, watsonx BI Assistant, watsonx Orchestrate, watsonx Code Assistant, or some combination of these tools and AI assistance services.
AI governance, AI ethics, and regulatory-compliance-focused features include a commitment to only using trusted datasets for training, hands-on data and AI governance tools for users, and a hybrid and governed large-scale data store. With watsonx.governance specifically, users can benefit from a platform-agnostic governance approach that works on platforms like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex, Microsoft Azure, and watsonx.ai. Especially as AI regulations ramp up in the coming years, this is an impressive tool for organizations that want to quickly scale their governance practices.
Pricing for most watsonx platform features is based on the number of virtual processor cores (VPCs) a user requires. Three SaaS tiers are currently available: Trial, Essentials, and Standard. These tiers include watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, and watsonx.governance:

Best for AutoML
H2O AI Cloud is an enterprise AI and ML platform that comes from H2O.ai, a leading AI cloud company with over 10 years of experience developing AI and ML solutions. The company’s goal is to democratize AI and make it accessible to organizations of all sizes.
In addition to the core H2O AI Cloud platform, H2O.ai also offers the open-source generative AI solution, h2oGPT, which provides tools (H2O LLM Studio, a framework and no-code GUI) for data scientists and developers to build and deploy large language models and chatbot applications. Most recently, the company also released Danube2-18B, an open-source LLM that is both user-friendly and enterprise-quality.
H2O AI Cloud provides comprehensive automated machine learning (autoML) capabilities and no-code deep learning engines through a flexible and scalable cloud platform. The autoML approach in particular makes it possible for users of all different backgrounds to work with the interface’s no-code UI to develop usable workflows and pipelines.
H2O.ai doesn’t advertise its rates on its website. They encourage interested buyers to request a demo, and quotes will be sent after the demo based on the buyer’s needs. Publicly available pricing information from AWS Marketplace shows that H2O AI Cloud costs $50,000 per unit, with a minimum of four AI units.

Best for Industry-Specific Model Development
The C3 AI Platform is a unique enterprise AI solution that supports digital transformation projects on an enterprise scale while still remaining accessible to both technical and non-technical team members. C3 AI enables users to ideate, plan, build, deploy, and maintain enterprise AI applications, including for highly specific industries and industrial use cases. For example, one set of C3 AI applications is prebuilt and designed for manufacturing problems and challenges, including inventory parameter management, supply chain variable calculations, and automated recommendations for inventory analysts.
C3 AI Platform customers primarily come from highly regulated sectors with complex workflows, including manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, defense and intelligence, government, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, and retail. The platform includes a democratized AI studio space, open architecture, and a shared data and model ontology to speed up and improve model deployments.
C3 AI is not transparent with its pricing information or plans. Prospective buyers will need to contact the company directly for more information.

Best for Organizational Knowledge Management & Search
Glean is a generative AI platform that focuses on organizational knowledge management and enterprise search, giving employee users at all levels the tools they need to find, access, save, and share different kinds of business documents and data. All users receive access to the workplace search feature, which is accompanied by an AI assistant that can help users find answers and content that is geared for their specific role, search query, and search history and habits.
From an administrative perspective, the platform also does a compelling job of storing information in such a way that it’s easy to update outdated resources, manage privacy and compliance, and create teams and environments for productive collaboration. Many users also appreciate how Glean’s knowledge graph, plug-ins and connectors, and work hub platform combine the best of both ease of use and customizable workplace search and knowledge management.
According to a Glean representative, the product is priced per user per month and billed at an annual flat rate. Though the website does not transparently list plans or rates, the Glean customer service representative with whom we chatted shared that different packages are available based on company size and scalable goals. The company typically requires a $40,000 annual contract minimum for teams with fewer than 100 users.

Best for General Workplace Task Assistance
Microsoft Copilot is a built-in AI assistant that works within several Microsoft products. A free chat interface is available and works similarly to ChatGPT and Gemini, offering several great multimodal capabilities. However, Microsoft’s copilot technology really shines in Microsoft 365 in particular, where tools like Word, Teams, Excel, and others have built in smart assistance, content completion, automations, and workflow support for some of the most common daily and routine business tasks.
Because so many businesses rely on the Microsoft Suite tools for their business operations, this tool has quickly grown in popularity. Microsoft Copilot is also available in a handful of other Microsoft business tools, including PowerApps, Dynamics 365, and Power BI (in preview).
Pay-as-you-go pricing is a key component of many Microsoft products, including the account users sign up for to use Microsoft Copilot business tier products. The online chat interface of Microsoft Copilot can be freely accessed or upgraded to Copilot Pro for $20 per user per month.
For the most popular business-specific Microsoft Copilot solutions, here’s what pricing looks like:

Best for Digital Marketing Agencies & Teams
Jasper is a suite of AI copilot tools that focuses on supplementing digital and content marketing efforts across social media and web channels. Its tools cover a range of features and functions, including art and image generation for ads and thumbnails, AI content templates, chatbots that provide customer and user assistance, automated end-to-end marketing campaigns, and smart understanding for brand voice and style guides.
Many users select Jasper because the platform can generate content based on the context users provide, including descriptions of what they want content to include, knowledge about specific products or services, instructions on tone of voice and audience, SEO guidance, and style guides.
Many digital marketing teams and agencies also select Jasper for its ease of use and ability to integrate with existing marketing tools. The Jasper API, Chrome browser extension, and a variety of collaboration tools make the Jasper For Business version of the platform a particularly effective tool for holistic marketing strategies and extensibility.
Jasper is available in three main subscription plans:

Best for Notetaking Assistance
Fireflies is an AI-powered note-taking platform that automates the process of capturing meeting information, including audio transcripts, text notes, and highlights. It uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to transcribe meeting recordings and provide users with actionable notes to save them hours of manual post-meeting note-taking and follow-up.
Beyond its basic content summarization features, Fireflies has also continued to expand its conversation analytics and search capabilities. With these two features, users can get a more enterprise-level experience out of an otherwise-simple AI tool, learning more about what was said and how while also quickly pulling important conversational snippets out of longer transcripts. Most recently, Fireflies has come out in a mobile app version.
Four pricing tiers are available for Fireflies:

Best for Unified Sales, Marketing, & Service Support
Salesforce Einstein is a family of AI tools and solutions that are available across the Salesforce ecosystem. Whether you use Salesforce for marketing, sales, service, e-commerce, or some combination of all of these, dedicated Einstein AI capabilities have been designed to automate customer data and experience management in smart ways.
The design of Salesforce itself, with its separate clouds that work seamlessly in a united platform, makes its Einstein AI technology particularly practical and effective. Businesses can easily manage customers throughout their buyer lifecycle, from the time they’re a prospective buyer who requires dedicated marketing campaigns until they become a loyal customer who benefits from frequent nurture campaigns or customer service workflows.
Certain Saelsforce cloud subscription tiers include access to Einstein capabilities. These are your best options for Einstein access:

Best for Client-Facing & Sales Teams
Chorus is a conversational intelligence and recording solution that helps users analyze all customer engagements across video conferencing, phone calls, and email channels to learn about their performance in these engagements. With this in-depth data, teams can work to convert prospects into paying customers and forecast future outcomes more accurately.
Chorus comes with features like sales call analysis, deal intelligence, relationship management focused on CRM data, and other advanced AI-driven insights to help teams modify actions for better customer conversations. Since its acquisition by ZoomInfo, Chorus also includes more advanced integrated intelligence about customer contacts and the company, which benefits go-to-market teams even more.
ZoomInfo, which acquired Chorus.ai, doesn’t publicly advertise its pricing on its website unless you fill out an information request form. However, the company pricing page shows that they offer three plans: Sales, Marketing, and Talent. ZoomInfo usually charges based on your required features, functionality, license number, and credit usage.

Best for Customer Success Teams
Tidio is a live chat and chatbot platform for customer support, sales, and marketing. It enables businesses to communicate with customers and visitors in real time and analyze and optimize their conversations.
It offers a suite of useful sales and CX-focused features, including automated chatbot responses, integrated messaging apps, AI-based automated responses, and integrations with third-party software. The Lyroi AI Chatbot and Reply Assistant are two of its most effective AI capabilities, helping businesses create smoother customer service and response workflows.
Tidio offers various pricing plans, with one free and five paid plans.

Best Overall Generative AI Platform
Released in November 2022, ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that interacts with users conversationally. It allows you to have a human-like conversation with the artificial intelligence tool, which has the ability “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
Business users can use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas, create first drafts, generate outlines, email ideas, or discuss complex concepts. With the tool’s increasing modality that has come with GPT-4, users can also generate images and videos and benefit from internet connectivity for more up-to-date results.
While ChatGPT offers many benefits, some companies have banned or limited its usage by their employees for compliance reasons and to prevent the release of confidential information. I highly recommend that all business leaders who choose to use ChatGPT and GPT-4 in their businesses also develop a usage policy and train their employees on appropriate use, as proprietary data can easily be misused in the tool.
ChatGPT and GPT-4 pricing varies based on your chosen model and prompt. Here’s what pricing looks like for GPT-4 models:
ChatGPT subscriptions are also available for users who simply want to benefit from GPT-4 functionality without working on their own model use cases.

Best for Integrated Generative AI & Internet Experience
Vertex AI is Google’s enterprise AI development platform that includes a range of capabilities and models. Most recently, it has added the highly-praised Gemini models to its collection, including Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash. In Vertex AI, users can build custom instances of their favorite AI models, training, fine-tuning, and comprehensively testing performance metrics within the platform. The platform is designed to unify data and AI in such a way that users can develop models with little lag time or error.
The Gemini aspect of Vertex AI is one of my personal favorites. Compared to most other generative AI models, I like how well Gemini integrates with Google Search mechanisms, even with widgets that focus on specific types of search (travel, for example). I also appreciate how well this model incorporates user feedback into its performance improvement plans.
Pricing for Vertex AI is highly variable. First, you’ll need to determine what model type and data format you’re working with (image, video, tabular, or text data). Model options include training, edge on-device training, deployment and online prediction, and batch prediction models. Each of these listings has a different per-node-hour pricing setup. Additional costs are accrued based on Vertex AI Forecast selections, machine types in use, accelerators in use, disks in use, region, and more. To find out exactly how much Vertex AI (and accompanying models like Gemini) will cost for your business, check out the pricing page here.

Best for Ethical Generative AI Strategy
Claude 3 is the latest generation of Anthropic’s Claude, a generative AI model and chat interface that emphasizes ethical outcomes as much as high performance. The newest generation of Claude stands out for a few reasons: It continues to rely on the company’s standard Constitution AI framework and other ethical AI standards, but it has also improved its abilities, adding a larger context window, fewer refusals, and additional responsible design features.
Depending on your requirements, you can work with either Claude 3 Opus, the larger and more intelligent version of the model, or Claude 3 Sonnet, the lightweight and simpler version of Claude 3. There’s also Claude.ai, a free, online version of the tool that works well for users who only need access to simple chat capabilities. My personal favorite thing about the Claude interface is the ability to add attachments to my queries.
Pricing for Claude 3 is as follows:
Users also have the option to access legacy models — including Claude 2.1, Claude 2.0, and Claude Instant — as well as claude.ai, a free online version of the tool.

Best for Generative Coding & Developer Assistance
GitHub Copilot is a collaboration among GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI that supports developers — including student developers with minimal coding skills — with programming, code completion, and code quality assurance tasks. This particular Copilot is unique in that it works effectively for highly technical tasks but allows users to query and improve their code through natural language.
Most recently, an enterprise version of GitHub Copilot was released. This more advanced solution includes a range of chat capabilities, including a beta web search capability powered through Bing; several code completion capabilities; smart actions; multiple IDE; and other supported environments; and comprehensive management and policy features for organizations that need to keep their code aligned with organizational and larger compliance standards.
Pricing plans are available for both individuals and business teams:

Best for Enterprise API Usability
Cohere Command is one of the latest and greatest collections of generative models from Cohere, considered a pioneer and leader in the generative AI space. Most recently, the company has released its R and R+ series of Command models to the public; these models intend to meet the needs of enterprise users in areas like content summarization, research, and analysis while also offering a range of lightweight and heavyweight options. The Cohere Command models are the engine behind Cohere Generate, an LLM text generation solution that is frequently customized by business users.
Cohere’s models can be used as-is or fine-tuned and customized to align with more specific business use cases. Its API and accompanying documentation are some of the best in this area, offering incredibly straightforward information about how to get started and scale with your own projects. Helpful SDK and getting started documentation is also available.
Access to Cohere’s Command model is available in both free and paid options:

Best for Task-Specific Models
AI21 Studio is an interactive and accessible interface for business users who want to work with AI21 Labs’ foundation and task-specific models. Users frequently praise its easy-to-use interface, API documentation, and enterprise scalability. One of its greatest assets is access for unlimited users in each of its plans; this approach makes it an especially strategic investment for larger teams that want to experiment with and collaborate on AI projects.
AI21 Studio is also a unique solution because of the many different task-specific models it extends to its users. While the majority of these capabilities focus on text generation and other text-related tasks, the operations they can perform are highly specific and useful in a business context. AI21 Studio’s task-specific models and APIs include Wordtune, Text Improvements, Grammatical Error Corrections, Summarize, Text Segmentation, Contextual Answers, Semantic Search, and Embeddings.
With AI21 Studio, users can subscribe to a Pay as You Go or Custom plan. The Pay As You Go plan operates with usage-based pricing and comes with a limited free trial option for three months. The Custom plan is available with more advanced features and volume discounts.
In addition to these plans, users will likely need to pay for API-specific and model-specific access and usage. Pricing is as follows:
AI software offers several benefits to businesses, ranging from better support for decision making to competitive advantage.
With its ability to evaluate large datasets, AI can help enterprise users gain helpful insights from their existing data and operations. It can identify patterns, trends, and correlations that may not be readily apparent to human analysts, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
Automating tasks and optimizing processes with AI minimizes or even eliminates costly errors and the need for manual intervention in various areas, resulting in cost-savings for businesses.
By analyzing customer data and behavior patterns with greater depth and intelligence, you can provide services tailored to your customer’s needs and offer customized customer support. Using AI for CX can boost your retention, loyalty, and customer satisfaction rates.
AI software can augment human capabilities and expertise, leading to a more skilled and efficient workforce. It can assist employees in their tasks, provide real-time guidance and recommendations, and enable them to leverage AI-generated insights effectively. This collaborative approach between humans and AI improves overall business operational performance and ultimately leads to increased efficiencies and revenue.
Companies can gain a competitive edge in the market by leveraging AI tools, from optimizing marketing campaigns to improving sales forecasting and enabling better product development. Using AI in this way allows enterprises to drive innovation and capture the market early with loyal customers who want these advanced capabilities.
Choosing the best AI software for your company can be challenging, as there are various factors to consider. Here are some steps to help you make an informed decision:
These steps help to streamline the process of selecting the best AI tool for your business. No matter what, go into this decision-making process with a consistent, unwavering commitment to choosing software that aligns with your specific needs, technical capabilities, and long-term goals.
There are thousands of AI software applications and services available, and many more are being released to the market daily. If my past research is any indication, several of these tool’s features will be updated and expanded within a few weeks or months.
Regardless of your industry, team sizes, functions, and technical expertise, there is an AI software solution out there that can help optimize your current business processes and boost your competitive advantage. Especially with the range of price points — including free and open-source AI tools — it’s worth investing the necessary time and research into identifying an AI solution or several that can help you run your business better.
For a full portrait of the AI vendors serving a wide array of business needs, read our in-depth guide: 150+ Top AI Companies
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