As I write this, tech stocks are getting hammered for increased AI spend without revenue to show for it. Capex commitments are climbing, but the results are not showing up yet. At the same time, consumer sentiment towards AI is shifting, Consumer AI adoption hardly grew even as spending tripled. (source). People are slowing down on picking up AI. 36% of people say they are less likely to engage with content made by AI, compared to 14% who are more likely.
It seems we may have reached the plateau in AI’s S-Curve of adoption. The really rapid part started in consumer in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, then moved over to Enterprise in 2025/6 with the huge run-up in enterprise spend on AI. But things are leveling off it seems.
What this means for business owners is the “all in” era is probably coming to a close. And it’s time to be more thoughtful about our AI investments. One thing you can probably guess from a slowdown in overall adoption is the power users are going to get charged more. Companies selling AI have to find a way to keep growing revenue and profit, so if there’s resistance on the top-end, it has to be within existing users.
This tells me that we have to be smart about how we use AI, where we use it, and how much we rely on it. It doesn’t mean we stop using it where it’s useful, particularly in programming. But it does mean we build systems that we understand and control, so if AI becomes too expensive, there are other options to get that work done. Meaning we break down the work ourselves, and feed small pieces to AI to execute on, assembly-line style.
The concept of AGI, letting AI just do it all for you, is nonsensical in my view.
On the marketing and sales side, AI can help with some particular pieces, like documentation for repeatable tasks, and AI integration for using software products, for users who prefer to chat instead of using the interface. These result in incremental gains.
As far as content goes, it seems pretty clear using AI is a net-negative. If 36% don’t engage, and 14% engage more, you are losing by a more than 2:1 ratio, and that’s bad. So we’ve shifted all content creation back to full human, with AI as an assistant for formatting etc.
It seems like we are not the only ones thinking in this way, so will be interesting to see if we are in fact at the leveling-off portion of the S-Curve, or if I’m totally off my rocker.
