How Long Until 50% Use of AI?

Most of us are familiar with the notion that newer waves of computing technology get adopted faster than older waves. Where it took almost two decades for personal computers to be adopted by half of households, it took less than a decade for internet use to reach half of U.S. households. Smartphones arguably reached half of users in about six years. 

So many of us would not be surprised if artificial intelligence use reached half of U.S. households in three years. That would be helped along by the fact that AI is expected to be used on smartphones, by consumer applications (social media, search, e-commerce, entertainment content), in autos and other machines and appliances as well. 

Of course, assumptions matter. We have to select particular products or apps to measure adoption. For purposes of the present analysis, we use the IBM PC as the tracked device. Obviously there were many hobbyist PCs available before then, but the IBM PC became the first mass market device “regular people” rather than hobbyists used. 

Likewise, with the internet, we track the multimedia World Wide Web, even if some people used bulletin boards before then. 

Smartphones likewise were available before the Apple  iPhone, perhaps most notably the Research in Motion BlackBerry, a mobile email device. But it was the iPhone that kicked off massive adoption by consumers. 

source: Pew Research Center 

The point is that adoption rates are lengthened if we use the hobbyist or early-adopter phases of each technology, rather than the point at which consumer mass adoption began. 

Technology	Year Introduced	Years to 10% Adoption	Years to 50% Adoption
Personal Computers	1981	5 (1986)	19 (2000)
Internet	1991	4 (1995)	9 (2000)
Smartphones	2007	2 (2009)	6 (2013)

If we consider advanced AI adoption starting around 2020 (with language models like GPT-3), AI  might reach 10-percent adoption in two years and 50 percent in three to four years. And that might be too conservative an assumption, given the fact that AI already has been used in making content recommendations, voice interfaces and search, even before the launch of language models. 

On the other hand, few consumers likely think of their use of search, e-commerce, social media or voice interfaces as “AI use,” whereas they probably do consider use of ChatGPT and other models as AI use. 

However, hardware embodiments (robots, autonomous vehicles) may align more with smartphone adoption timelines, as significant infrastructure, device development and cost reductions have  to occur.

The bigger question is “so what?” What impact will AI have on user experience or behavior? What new use cases will develop? What new markets could be created?