Appification in the Age of AI Exploring Embeddedness, Visibility, and Dependency

Building directly on the previous work in this series, this report examines the ‘appification of AI’—how AI creeps into our daily lives through various new types of applications and emerging app ecosystems. As the landscape shifts from generative to agentic AI, our central analytical concern is AI’s increasing embeddedness, visibility, and dependency as it transitions into an invisible, foundational infrastructure. Drawing on app studies, platform studies, and critical AI studies, the studies included in this collection investigate this unfolding process across three dimensions: AI-powered applications, everyday uses, and infrastructural integration. Through a series of mappings and five new case studies developed in collaboration with Master's students, the findings demonstrate AI’s systematic transition into an invisible, infrastructural foundation that redistributes power towards dominant platforms. Specific studies show that first-party AI apps deepen the infrastructural reach of providers through a ‘gradient of absorption’ in mundane task fulfillment; AI mental health apps introduce distinct app logics that reconfigure care; and in domains like food tracking and beauty, there is a consistent gap between developers’ advanced technological narratives and users’ practical, often culturally localised, interpretation of AI. Ultimately, the report highlights the critical significance of app and platform studies for understanding the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of AI as it becomes structurally integrated into the apps and infrastructures of everyday life.