AI Application Development Platforms
Software engineering leaders’ top priority is to infuse AI into products. AI application development platforms streamline the process of building AI agents, assistants, and multimodal applications. Use this evaluation to identify suitable vendors based on your organization’s needs.
Market Definition
To provide clients with a more thorough evaluation of this market, we have replaced our Market Guide for AI Application Development Platforms with this new Magic Quadrant.
Gartner defines AI application development platforms as those that offer the required technology and workflows to design, build, test and deploy AI-embedded applications. These platforms provide access to foundation models and the capability to ground and place guardrails around them. Software engineering teams utilize these platforms to build AI applications, such as assistants, agents, and multimodal applications.
Software engineering leaders face increasing pressure to incorporate AI into their products. AI application development platforms host the necessary tooling for enterprise developers to build AI assistants, agents, and multimodal apps without extensive knowledge of machine learning. AI application development platforms focus on providing the features developers need to ground models with organizational knowledge. They also reduce risk by implementing responsible AI processes and guardrails within their AI-embedded applications. These platforms help scale the development of AI-embedded applications by offering governance, evaluation metrics and support throughout the application life cycle. Not every platform will offer access to first-party models or application-testing capabilities.
AI application development platforms support building the following types of applications:
AI assistants leverage large language models (LLMs) to deliver functionality not obtained with traditional conversational AI technology. AI assistants enable improved Q&A support, new customer service and experience features, perform simple task automation and improved value outcomes.
AI agents can plan and automate more complex tasks, make informed decisions, interact with their surroundings, orchestrate with other tools and AI agents. AI agents are semiautonomous or autonomous applications that may utilize a variety of AI techniques to identify patterns in their environment, make decisions, execute a sequence of tasks and generate outputs to achieve a defined goal.
Multimodal applications combine multiple modalities (image, text, audio) to provide new experiences. Humanize and enhance the creativity of internal and customer communications, enabling hyper personalization. These nascent solutions utilize advanced natural language technologies (NLT), virtual assistants (VAs), graphic creation tools, computer vision, audio creation, and multimodal and emotional AI.
Report 2025
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
|
Leader |
Amazon Web Services |
Leader |
Microsoft |
Leader |
IBM |
Visionary |
OpenAI |
Niche Player |
CoreWeaver (Weigths & Biases) |
Challenger |
Volcano Empire |
Challenger |
Alibaba Cloud |
Challenger |
Palantir |
Challenger |
Tencent Cloud |
Challenger |
LangChain |