Something has definitely shifted this year in how enterprise buyers talk about AI. The question used to be "should we be doing something with AI?" Now it's "which vendors have actually rebuilt around it, and which ones have just added a feature and moved on?"
AI has progressed from a boardroom debate to a procurement criterion. This month's new G2 categories — spanning financial crime detection, developer tooling, gaming support, healthcare imaging, and enterprise consulting — reflect that harder, more specific kind of scrutiny.
That shift is clearest in a category that didn't exist in meaningful form two years ago. The new Anthropic Claude Consulting Services category marks G2's recognition of an emerging ecosystem of specialized firms helping organizations implement, customize, and scale Claude-powered workflows across the enterprise. It's a signal that Claude has moved beyond individual developer adoption into institutional deployment — and that buyers now need a structured way to evaluate the partners guiding that work.
The same dynamic is reshaping how financial institutions fight crime. Agentic Financial Crime platforms represent a meaningful departure from rule-based fraud detection: rather than flagging transactions against static thresholds, these systems reason across behavioral signals, adapt in real time, and act on patterns that traditional models miss entirely. The stakes, and the expectations, are materially higher.
On the infrastructure side, AI Integration Tools Platforms reflect the growing complexity of connecting AI models to the systems and data sources they need to actually do useful work. What was once a developer problem solved with custom code has matured into a dedicated category of tooling, as organizations realize that model quality is only one part of what makes an AI deployment succeed.
Below, we break down what's driving each new category and the top products leading the way at launch.
1. Anthropic Claude Consulting Services
About this category: Anthropic Claude Consulting Services are firms that help enterprises adopt, deploy, and scale solutions built specifically on Anthropic’s Claude models.
Why it was introduced: “Enterprise AI adoption is becoming increasingly model-specific. Organizations are no longer selecting only a general AI strategy or a cloud provider; they are making deliberate decisions about which foundation models should support particular workloads based on factors such as reasoning performance, context capacity, safety requirements, development experience, and enterprise controls.
As Claude’s adoption grows, a distinct services ecosystem is forming around the platform. Anthropic’s expansion into the enterprise market, the introduction of the Claude Partner Network, and increased use of Claude for coding, knowledge work, document-intensive processes, and agentic applications have created demand for providers with proven Claude-specific implementation experience.
G2 created this category because general AI consulting services do not adequately distinguish between firms that offer broad, model-agnostic guidance and those with the technical depth to deploy Claude in production. Buyers evaluating a Claude initiative need to identify providers that understand Anthropic’s platform, architecture, governance model, and advanced capabilities, not simply firms that list Claude among many supported models.
The need for specialized support is particularly important as organizations move beyond isolated pilots. Production deployments require decisions about security, data access, model behavior, integrations, cost management, user adoption, and the design of applications and agents around Claude. These requirements create a different buyer need from general AI strategy consulting or traditional systems integration.
This category also reflects the broader maturation of the foundation-model market. As leading model providers develop their own enterprise products, partner programs, tooling, and technical ecosystems, consulting services are beginning to organize around individual platforms in the same way services markets have historically formed around major cloud, CRM, and enterprise software vendors.
Anthropic Claude Consulting Services gives buyers a dedicated place to find partners with validated Claude expertise and helps distinguish an emerging provider ecosystem that would otherwise be obscured within broader AI consulting categories.”
-Bijou Barry, AI Principal Analyst, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
2. Agentic Financial Crime
About this category: Agentic Financial Crime uses AI to conduct financial crime workflows without the need for traditional, often cumbersome, manual human input. Relying instead on human-in-the-loop strategies, this powerful new area of financial crime software aids organizations that are facing growing transaction volumes, mounting regulatory pressure, and investigator shortages that rule-based AML tools often can no longer absorb.
Why it was introduced: “The Agentic Financial Crime category allows regulators and institutions to meet malicious actors on even terms with AI firepower. The sheer number of monitored transactions, coupled with increasing regulatory pressure from both traditional financial institutions and newer AI-focused compliance frameworks, means this category can significantly alleviate the pressure and scrutiny financial institutions are under.”
– Brandon Summers-Miller, Research Principal, Cybersecurity and Data Privacy, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
3. AI Integration Tools Platforms
About this category: AI agent integrations and tools are platforms that let AI agents discover, authenticate with, and take actions in business software using standardized protocols such as MCP, A2A, RPC, and REST. These tools provide the connectivity, managed authentication, and developer infrastructure that let agents reach into CRMs, communication platforms, and other SaaS applications and execute tasks without a developer writing bespoke integration code for every tool the agent needs to use.
Why it was introduced: "AI agents can now reason, plan, and make decisions, but for most of the last two years, they've had nowhere to act. The gap between an agent deciding what to do and an agent actually doing it securely, at scale, across dozens of different SaaS tools has become one of the defining engineering problems of agentic AI.
G2 created this category to recognize the infrastructure layer purpose-built for that problem. These platforms go beyond traditional iPaaS tools, which were designed for human-configured, design-time workflows, and beyond unified API products, which normalize data reads but were never built with an AI agent as the primary consumer.
AI Agent Integrations and Tools platforms treat the agent itself as the caller: They expose tool schemas the agent can discover at runtime, manage OAuth and credentials on the agent's behalf, and enforce the rate limiting, retries, and observability that production agent deployments require.
This category reflects where the market is actually heading. Every major SaaS vendor is racing to expose agent-callable actions, every major AI lab has converged on MCP as the default tool-access layer, and enterprises are no longer piloting agents; they're deploying them into production and asking these platforms to govern what those agents are allowed to touch.
AI Agent Integrations and Tools represent the connective tissue of the agentic enterprise. They are what determine whether an AI agent stays a clever demo or becomes a system your business can actually run on."
– Sohan Pal, G2 Market Research Analyst
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
4. Player Support Platforms
About this category: Our new Player Support Platforms category was created to distinguish support tools built specifically for video game studios and publishers from general-purpose help desk and live chat software. These solutions help player experience teams manage requests like account recovery, failed purchases, and technical issues, often through in-game or in-app channels rather than a separate support portal.
Why it was introduced: “Player support has become its own discipline as live-service games and seasonal content push more volume onto support teams that need to resolve issues fast and keep players in the game. General help desk and live chat tools were not built to handle gaming-specific context, like in-game purchase history, player profile details, and the gaming device the player is using.
G2 recognizes player support platforms as purpose-built tools for gaming customer support. These solutions capture player inquiries as tickets, conversations, or cases, surface player and account context to agents during a support interaction, and offer self-service and automation capabilities that reduce ticket volume during high-traffic periods. This functionality is delivered by dedicated player support vendors such as Helpshift and Notch, as well as by broad customer support solutions like Fin that have gaming-specific capabilities."
– Adam Crivello, Market Research Principal, Software Development, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
5. Backend as a Service (BaaS)
About this category: Backend as a Service (BaaS) is a managed backend for applications. A team building an app usually needs a database, APIs, user login, and file storage. BaaS provides all of this a single hosted service instead of the team building each piece themselves.
Why it was introduced: "This category existed before it had a place on G2. Products that offer a managed backend were sitting in categories meant for a different kind of buyer, someone looking for a tool to build an app, not infrastructure to run one that's already built. Those are two different things to shop for. Someone comparing backend providers isn't comparing app-building tools, and putting them in the same category makes it harder to find and compare the right options. Giving BaaS its own category fixes that."
— Hardik Jain, G2 Market Research Analyst, Software Development & AI Infrastructure, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
6. Red Teaming Tools
About this category: Red Teaming Tools represent traditional cybersecurity products that allow full-scale, adversarial simulated attacks for independent groups to test an organization’s defenses. Unlike other methods of cybersecurity, red teaming is goal-oriented and team-focused, more closely mimicking real-world threats. This form of ethical hacking allows organizations to identify weaknesses in their security protocols before malicious actors can take advantage of them.
Why it was introduced: “As AI continues to pose an increasingly large threat against security systems, companies need dedicated tools to stress-test models for jailbreaks, leaks, and bad outputs before launch, especially as new AI regulations make that testing mandatory. Ample vendors exist in this well-defined space, and G2 now has a dedicated category where buyers can find them.”
– Brandon Summers-Miller, Research Principal
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
7. Event Lead Capture
About this category: Event lead capture software helps exhibitors, sponsors, and field sales teams capture, qualify, and sync leads from in-person and hybrid events straight into their CRM, without relying on the event organizer's systems. Unlike traditional lead retrieval tools, which are rented per event and limited to whatever data the organizer collected at registration, these platforms are exhibitor-owned, work across any event or venue, and use AI-driven enrichment to turn booth conversations and badge scans into a qualified pipeline.
Why it was introduced: "Lead Retrieval was built for a different era: You'd rent a badge scanner from the show organizer for the weekend, then hand it back at the end, like borrowing a hotel phone that only works in that one hotel. Exhibitors don't work that way anymore. Tools like Popl, Blinq, momencio, and iCapture are more like your own smartphone: You own it, it works at every event you go to, and everything you capture goes straight into your CRM instead of sitting in a pile of badges nobody scans.
Grouping both under 'Lead Retrieval' is like putting rented flip phones and owned iPhones in the same bucket; it doesn't tell buyers what they're actually choosing between. There's also demand nobody's serving: People are already searching 'Event Lead Capture' on G2, and until now, we had no category to point them to. As more companies invest in in-person events, this category will make it easy to see whether a booth's conversations turn into real pipeline, or just names that never get followed up on."
— Yukta Rustagi, Market Research Analyst, Sales, Marketing & Digital Advertising Software, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
8. PACS
About this category: Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) allows healthcare providers to store, view, and share diagnostic images like X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans in one place. They are a core part of imaging workflows across hospitals and imaging centers. This ensures clinicians have the images they need to make informed decisions for their patients.
Why it was introduced: Medical imaging plays a key role in how patients are diagnosed and treated, making the software that supports it an essential part of modern healthcare. Hospitals and imaging centers rely on PACS to manage the growing volume of diagnostic images. With the global PACS market valued at $3.39 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $5.81 billion by 2034, demand for these solutions continues to grow. G2's new PACS category helps buyers find, compare, and evaluate solutions built specifically for medical image management.
- Neya Kumaresan, Market Research Analyst, LegalTech and FinTech, G2
The top three products in this category, ranked by popularity at the time of launch, are:
There’s always something new on G2!
On average, G2’s Market Research team adds 5–10 new categories per month, so we encourage you to review our research agenda and utilize the all-new G2.ai to leave a voice review on the software you recommend!
Come back next month to see additional new categories on G2! And, check out the new categories that went live last month.
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