The AI Creative
Market Map.
Making a market map in the era of AI is impossible. We did it anyway — 250+ tools across 19 categories, with commentary on where the trillion-dollar creative economy is actually moving.
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Compiled by Machine Cinema · Q2 2026
Two years ago, the AI stack
was four tools.
Today it’s a category map. Next year, who knows.
Six things to know before you open the PDF.
Pulled from the commentary in the PDF. Written from inside the room, after a year of putting these tools in real hands.
Models still rule the space
We're all downstream of model providers. When Seedance shipped, aggregators rushed to integrate it within days, or lose users to providers who already had it. As models improve, every tool downstream gets stronger.
The revenue isn't where you think
ElevenLabs gets the majority of its revenue from enterprise: customer service and internal comms. Midjourney classifies a huge slice of users as “art therapy.” Hollywood dominates the ideology. The rest of the world dominates the P&L.
For lack of moat, become the ocean
Everyone is trying to be everything. Runway hosts Seedance under the hood. Aggregators ship every model at once. The application layer is still undecided, and the race is to own all of it.
The aggregator category exploded
A year ago aggregators were a side note. This year they're the densest part of the map, and where working creators spend most of their day.
The Chinese have arrived
Not just in models (Hunyuan, Wan, HappyHorse, Seedance) but in aggregators too. The center of gravity for tool-building is no longer a single city.
We've barely seen agentic
Multi-shot agents, world models, programmatic video, AI gaming: none of these were conversations a year ago. We've gotten a taste of the agentic creative world. The next year is going to feel very different.
Five phases, nineteen categories.
The map follows the creative value chain, from script to screen to streamer.
Everyone wants to be everything.
For lack of moat, become the ocean.
There’s a longer piece on the Substack.
Category-by-category breakdowns, what shifted year over year, the rise of the aggregator, the arrival of Chinese tooling, and why the application layer is still up for grabs.
Read on Substack
Minh has been mapping this space since there were only four tools.
Cofounder of Machine Cinema, the global community of 1,500+ AI creators across 30+ countries. Before that, he spent over a decade in media and tech: Chief Innovation Officer at EST Media, Chief Editor at Vietcetera, and an investor at Vertex Venture Holdings (Grab, Waze, Desktop Metal).
He runs GenJams™ and creator accelerators every week. That’s how this map gets made: by putting the tools in real hands.