We are excited to announce our first category round-up for 2025! G2’s Market Research team, consisting of 29 research analysts, curates the world’s leading taxonomy for business software and services.
In March and April 2025, our Market Research team added 12 categories to G2’s growing marketplace, which has over 2,100 categories. Hear from the expert analysts overseeing these new categories, sharing the details to know if you’re a software vendor in this space, a buyer seeking these types of solutions, or anyone else interested in the evolving software landscape!
Emerging AI software represents innovative, AI-first solutions that extend beyond traditional AI classifications and existing G2 categories. These products leverage advanced generative AI, agentic AI capabilities, machine learning (ML), deep learning, and related technologies to address novel challenges and create unique user experiences
"AI software is moving quickly. At G2, we are keeping up. We have created a new and exciting emerging AI software category in order to track and capture the latest and great AI innovations. As groups and clusters form in the inchoate category, the team will investigate and determine if a new category has emerged. The roots of AI greatness lay buried within this category."
- Matthew Miller, G2 principal research analyst for AI and Analytics
The Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO) category fills a critical gap in the market by addressing the limitations of existing categories such as search engine optimization (SEO), online reputation management (ORM), and AI model monitoring. AIO software bridges these gaps by offering AI-specific visibility tracking, sentiment analysis, and ranking insights—empowering businesses to optimize their brand positioning in AI-generated responses and recommendations.
“As generative AI continues to transform digital search and information retrieval, the need for dedicated AIO tools is becoming increasingly urgent, making this category essential for forward-thinking marketing and strategy teams.”
- Matthew Miller, G2 principal research analyst for AI and Analytics
G2 has launched the AI Customer Support Agents category to represent solutions purpose-built for automating and optimizing customer service. Eligible products must integrate with CRMs and help desk platforms, use NLP for contextual understanding, offer analytics, support human-in-the-loop features, execute tasks on behalf of users, and maintain omnichannel communication.
“This new category allows buyers to clearly identify advanced AI agents designed for customer service, helping them adopt tools that deliver scalable, high-quality, and automated support experiences across every channel.”
- Matthew Miller, G2 principal research analyst for AI and Analytics
G2 has introduced the AI IT Agents category to spotlight solutions designed for autonomous IT support. Qualifying products must integrate with ITSM systems, use NLP for understanding and responding, support automation for tasks like ticket resolution and issue detection, offer human-in-the-loop capabilities, and ensure compliance and configurability. AI IT agents provide extensive integrations that enhance their ability to act independently and intelligently.
“This category enables software buyers to distinguish AI tools purpose-built for IT operations, helping them identify scalable, efficient solutions that elevate IT support through automation, contextual intelligence, and seamless integration.”
- Matthew Miller, G2 principal research analyst for AI and Analytics
G2 has launched the AI SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) category to spotlight AI agents purpose-built for sales development. To qualify, products must integrate with CRMs and data platforms, use NLP for conversation, enable workflow customization, support human-in-the-loop capabilities, and autonomously manage inbound and outbound sales tasks.
“This new category clarifies the distinction between general-purpose conversational AI and role-specific, autonomous sales agents—empowering software buyers to find advanced tools designed to scale high-quality sales outreach and engagement.”
- Matthew Miller, G2 principal research analyst for AI and Analytics
G2 added a new IT Documentation category to address the market for IT-specific knowledge base solutions. While this category is not limited to software that only handles IT documentation, software tools in this space must have some IT-specific feature set (templates, etc).
“Our new IT Documentation category represents knowledge management products with a specific focus on IT. These solutions allow users to author, manage, and access critical technical information about an organization’s IT processes. Notable vendors in the category include IT Glue, ClickUp, Hudu, and Confluence among several others.”
- Adam Crivello, G2 principal research analyst for Development
Businesses use AI coding assistants to streamline team productivity, improve code quality, and maintain consistent coding standards across projects. These tools reduce coding errors, accelerate software development cycles, and simplify the onboarding of new team members by offering contextual recommendations and immediate feedback tailored to organizational practices.
“AI Coding Assistants are a subset of code generation products which integrate directly with the development environment to aid users on the fly. These AI pair programmers assist developers in writing, editing, optimizing, and troubleshooting code.”
- Adam Crivello, G2 principal research analyst for Development
Network as a Service (NaaS) providers offer businesses cloud-based network solutions, such as connectivity, security, and traffic management. These solutions reduce the need to purchase and manage physical networking hardware and allows companies to manage their networks more efficiently and cost-effectively.
“G2 is introducing a new category for Network as a Service (NaaS) providers to reflect the shift toward cloud-delivered, subscription-based networking. While existing categories like SD-WAN and VPN address specific components, they don't fully capture the value of NaaS, which provides on-demand, scalable, and secure network infrastructure without the need for heavy hardware investments. As organizations adapt to hybrid work, distributed applications, and cloud-native operations, NaaS is becoming essential for modern, agile connectivity. Key players driving innovation in this space include Megaport, Aryaka Networks, Alkira, Juniper Networks, and Nile.”
- Anindita Sengupta, G2 senior research analyst for Cloud Infrastructure and Web Hosting
AI storyboard generators use artificial intelligence to transform written ideas, scripts, or prompts into visual storyboards. It often generates illustrative scenes from text, helping users quickly map out narratives in a visual format.
“G2 is launching a new category for AI Storyboard Generators to reflect the growing role of generative AI in visual storytelling and pre-production. While related categories like animation and video editing tools offer limited support for storyboarding, they don’t capture the end-to-end capabilities of platforms that use AI to automate scene planning, shot generation, and visual sequencing. These tools are helping marketers, content creators, and production teams move from idea to visual concept faster than ever. Some notable players include Boords, Storyboard Hero, Krock.io, LTX Studio, and Elai.io.”
- Anindita Sengupta, G2 senior research analyst for Cloud Infrastructure and Web Hosting
Presentation management solutions are utilized for creating, organizing, distributing, and updating presentation content across users and teams (specifically for sales, marketing, and consultancies). Its primary aim is to streamline the creation and management of slide decks and templates.
"Presentation management software empowers teams to create, organize, and collaborate on slide decks from a centralized library of approved content. Unlike traditional tools that focus primarily on slide creation, presentation management solutions streamline the full presentation lifecycle, ensuring brand compliance, productivity, and consistency across teams. A dedicated presentation management category on G2 is essential to distinguish these comprehensive solutions, meeting the growing needs of modern businesses."
- Neeraja Prakash, G2 associate research analyst for Collaboration and Productivity Software
SAP Security software is a software platform that offers complete protection of a company’s SAP Systems and environments, including several SAP applications such as SAP 4/HANA, SAP Cloud, and SAP ERP.
“SAP systems are used by numerous companies to manage financial data, customer information, business data, and processes that require an extensive and critical security posture to safeguard from cyber threats, compliance issues, and unauthorized access. With an increasing number of cyber security threats, organizations leveraging SAP platforms need to implement advanced security measures to protect critical business data and ensure compliance across their digital ecosystems. Notable vendors in the category include SecurityBridge Platform, Avantra, Logpoint, Pathlock, and The Onapsis Platform among several others.”
- Preethica Furtado, G2 market research manager
Risk intelligence software consolidates risk data from various external sources to give organizations greater insight into the full scope of their organizational risk profile. These external data sources may include traditional news media, social media, the dark web, regulatory filings, and more.
“G2 created a new category for Risk Intelligence to showcase an emerging market of software that captures data from external sources to give organizations greater insight into the full scope of their organizational risk profile. Other risk management categories on G2 largely focus on risk management tools that leverage internal data for assessment. Like other risk management tools, software in this category, such as Signal.AI, provides risk analysis and prioritization capabilities but the external data sources make them stand apart from traditional operational risk management software.”
- Lauren Worth, G2 senior research analyst for GRC and Security
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 G2’s Monty to navigate the ever-evolving taxonomy.
Come back next month to see the other new categories on G2!
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