9 ms·

AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out

193 points by toomuchtodo 1y ago

chrismorgan 1y ago
Given the charts, that’s a ridiculous claim. Just compare early 2024 in the first chart, for example. It’s way too early to decide whether it’s flattening out.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Especially interesting is the adoption by the smallest companies. This means people find it still increasingly useful at the grassroot level where things are actually done. At larger companies adoption will probably stop at the level where managers will start to be threatened.
  - crote 1y ago
    But what does that grassroot adoption look like in practice? Is that a developer spending $250/month on Claude, or is it a local corner shop using it once a month to replace their clip art flyer with AI slop, and the example contract they previously found via Google with some legalese gobbledygook ChatGPT hallucinated? Giving AI away for free to people who don't give a rat's ass about the quality of its output isn't very difficult. But that's not exactly going to pay your datacenter bill...
- malisper 1y ago
  Three consecutive months of decline starts to look more like a trend. Unless you think there's a transient issue causing the decline, something fundamental has changed
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    Again: compare early 2024. And that’s not the only thing; the second chart shows a possible flattening, but by no means certain yet, especially not when taken with the clear March–April jump; and the first chart shows no dwindling in 1–4, and clear recovery in 250+. The lie is easily put to the claim the article makes: > Data from the Census Bureau and Ramp shows that AI adoption rates are starting to flatten out across all firm sizes, see charts below. It’s flat-out nonsense, and anyone with any experience in this kind of statistics can see it.
- raincole 1y ago
  It's just printing headlines out of nothing. If it tried to answer why the two graphs show such different numbers (one ~14%, the other ~55%) I'd be more interested. > Note: Data is six-survey moving average. The survey is conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US Census Bureau, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist > Note: Ramp Al Index measures the adoption rate of artificial intelligence products and services among American businesses. The sample includes more than 40,000 American businesses and billions of dollars in corporate spend using data from Ramp’s corporate card and bill pay platform. Sources: Ramp, Bloomberg, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist It seems that the real interesting thing to see here is that the companies using Ramp are extremely atypical.
captainkrtek 1y ago
No no, we just need to put even more money in.
ajkjk 1y ago
Adoption = number of users Adoption rate = first derivative Flattening adoption rate = the second derivative is negative Starting to flatten = the third derivative is negative I don't think anyone cares what the third derivative of something is when the first derivative could easily change by a macroscopic amount overnight.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Not really. In this context adoption might be number of users. But adoption rate is a fraction of users that adopted this to all users.
  - ajkjk 1y ago
    Hm that's true. Both seem plausible in English. I didn't look closely enough to figure out which they meant.
- postexitus 1y ago
  Adoption rate is not derivative of Adoption. Rate of change is. Adoption rate is the percentage of uptake (there, same order with Adoption itself). It being flattening means first derivative is getting close to 0.
  - amelius 1y ago
    The function log(x) also has derivative that goes closer and closer to 0. However lim x->inf log(x) is still inf.
    - lkey 1y ago
      Is it your assertion that an 'infinite' percentage! of the businesses will use AI on a long enough time scale? If you need everything to be math, at least have the courtesy to use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function and not unbounded logarithmic curves when referring to on our very finite world.
  - 1y ago
xgulfie 1y ago
If I was openAI or whatever I would be investing in circular partnerships with claude or whatever, claim agentic use should be considered the same as real users, then have each other's LLM systems use each other and finally achieve infinite, uncapped user growth
- mancerayder 1y ago
  That could be argued to be a fraudulent approach to juicing metrics.
  - xgulfie 1y ago
    I wasn't suggesting lying about it
anon191928 1y ago
so no expot. growth? who would have guess? /s
malisper 1y ago
From the chart, the percentage of companies using AI has been going down over the past couple of months That's a massive deal because the AI companies today are valued on the assumption that they'll 10x their revenue over the next couple of years. If their revenue growth starts to slow down, their valuations will change to reflect that
- adventured 1y ago
  This bubble phase will play out just as the previous have in tech: consolidation, most of the value creation will go to a small group of companies. Most will die, some will thrive. Companies like Anthropic will not survive as an independent. They won't come close to having enough revenue & profit to sustain their operating costs (they're Lyft to Google or OpenAI's Uber, Anthropic will never reach the scale needed to roll over to significant profit generation). Its fair value is 1/10th or less what it's being valued at currently (yes because I say so). Anthropic's valuation will implode to reconcile that, as the market for AI does. Some larger company will scoop them up during the pain phase, once they get desperate enough to sell. When the implosion of the speculative hype is done, the real value creation will begin thereafter. Over the following two or three decades a radical amount of value will be generated by AI collectively, far beyond anything seen during this hype phase. A lot of lesser AI companies will follow the same path as Anthropic.
simonw 1y ago
Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025: https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down-for-large-companies/ https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... - their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies". I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and some uploaded census data: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/ Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter/#something-much-harder-recreating-the-ai-adoption-chart https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...
runako 1y ago
Without weighing in on the accuracy of this claim, this would be an expected part of the maturity cycle. Compare to databases. You could probably have plotted a chart of database adoption rates in the '90s as small companies started running e.g. Lotus Notes, FoxPro and SQL server everywhere to build in-house CRMs and back-office apps. Those companies still operate those functions, but now most small businesses do not run databases themselves. Why manage SQL Server when you can just pay for Salesforce and Notion with predictable monthly spend? (All of this is more complex, but analogous at larger companies.) My take is the big rise in AI adoption, if it arrives, will similarly be embedded inside application functions.
- ghaff 1y ago
  People push back against comments like these. But, as you suggest, the win isn't about individual developers potentially increasing their productivity by some inflated amount. It's about baking more prediction and automation into more tools that people who aren't developers use. Which is probably part of where the general meme of lack of interest in entry level programmers come from.
  - runako 1y ago
    Actually surprising when programmers (especially) push back. A couple years ago, people were doing copy/paste from ChatGPT to their IDEs. Now, they generally work at a higher level of abstraction in dedicated tools like Coded or Cursor. Why would other functions prefer the copy/paste lifestyle?
thesumofall 1y ago
They show two different surveys that are supposed to show the same underlying truth but differ by a factor of 3x? For the Ramp survey: why the sudden jump from 30% to 50% in March? For the Census one: How could it possibly be that only 12% of companies with more than 250 people „adopted“ (whatever that means) AI? It would be interesting if it were true but these charts don’t make any sense at all to me
- tripletao 1y ago
  The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services". I guess that's intended to exclude not-yet-productive investigations, and maybe also indirect uses--does LLM-powered OCR for the expense reports for the travelling sales representatives for a widget factory count? That's all vague enough that I guess it works mostly as a sentiment check, where the absolute value isn't meaningful but the time trend might be. The Ramp chart seems to use actual payment information from companies using their accounting platform. That should be more objective, though they don't disclose much about their methodology (and their customers aren't necessarily representative, the purpose and intensity of use aren't captured at all, etc.). https://ramp.com/data/ai-index https://ramp.com/data/ai-index
  - ac29 1y ago
    > The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services" That's odd. I use AI tools at work occasionally, but since our business involves selling physical goods, I guess we would not count as an AI adopter in this survey.
    - tripletao 1y ago
      After more investigation, I'm not sure what question was asked. I quoted that exact language from Apollo, and the Census Bureau uses very similar language in the spreadsheet with the aggregated responses, at https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/Employment%20Size%20Class.xlsx https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/Employment%20Size%... I'm unable to find a questionnaire with that language, though. I found a different questionnaire with many AI-related questions, some of which I believe would usefully capture both your situation and my hypothetical above. None closely match that language, though. The closest might be question 23, but that asks about use "in any of its business functions". https://www2.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/business-trends-and-outlook-survey/questionnaire-ai-supplement.pdf https://www2.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/busi...
sublinear 1y ago
I'm more interested in what the implications are for the economy and what this next AI winter looks like. What happens to all the debt? Was all this just for chatbots that are finally barely good enough for satnav and image gen that does slightly better photoshop that the layperson can use?
7moritz7 1y ago
The least volatile dataset, employee count 1-4 businesses, is steadily climbing in adoption. I feel like as long as the smallest businesses (so the most agile, non-enterprise software ones) increase in adoption, other sizes will follow.
mattas 1y ago
Not to be lost, but the first chart is actually a 3-month moving average. Surprised they buried that in the notes and didn't simply include it in the chart title. "Note: Data is six-survey moving average. The survey is conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US Census Bureau, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist"
whinvik 1y ago
I think what is happening is that people are realizing AI is not just plug and play. It can do amazing things but needs engineering around it. I think what will happen is in parallel more products will be built that address the engineering challenges and the models will keep getting better. I don't know though if that will lead to another hockey stick or just slow and steady.
emp17344 1y ago
My guess is AI will find niches where it provides productivity boosts, but won’t be as useful in the majority of fields. Right now, AI works pretty well for coding, and doesn’t really excel anywhere else. It’s not looking like it will get good enough to disrupt the economy at large.
- mwkaufma 1y ago
  Aside from financially-motivated "testimonials," there's no broad evidence that it even works that well for coding, with many studies even showing the opposite. Damning with faint praise.
  - turtletontine 1y ago
    I think what’s clear is many people feel much more productive coding with LLMs, but perceived and actual productivity don’t necessarily correlate. I’m sure results vary quite a bit. My hunch is that long term value might be quite low: a few years into vibe coding huge projects, developers might hit a wall with a mountain of slop code they can no longer manage or understand. There was an article here recently titled “vibe code is legacy code” which made a similar argument. Again, results surely vary wildly
    - mwkaufma 1y ago
      It feels like it's creating economic activity in the tech sector the same way that walking down the street and smashing everyone's windshields would create economic activity for local auto shops.
  - data-ottawa 1y ago
    It depends on a lot of things. I know JavaScript on a pretty surface level, but I can use Claude to wire up react and tailwind, and then my experience with all the other programming I’ve done gives me enough intuition to clean it up. That helps me turn rough things into usable tools that can be reused or deployed in small scale. That’s a productivity increase for sure. It has not helped me with the problems that I need to spend 2-5 days just thinking about and wrapping my head around solutions to. Even if it does come up with solutions that pass tests, they still need to be scrutinized and rewritten. But the small tasks it’s good at add up to being worth the price tag for a subscription.
adventured 1y ago
The average person has no idea what to use AI for to get substantial value out of what it can now do. It's the switch between: know which service to use, consider capabilities, try to get AI to do a thing, if you even have a thing that needs done that it can do; versus: AI just does a thing for you, requiring little to no thought. Very active vs very passive. Use will go up in direct relation to that changeover. The super users are already at peak, they're fully engaged. A software developer wants a very active relationship with their AI; Joe Average does not. The complexity has to vanish entirely. It's the difference between hiding the extraordinary engineering that is Google search behind a simple input box, and making users select a hundred settings before firing off a search. Imagine if the average search user needed to know something meaningful about the capabilities of Google search or search in general, before using it. Prime Google search (~1998-2016) obliterated the competition (including the portals) with that one simple search box, by shifting all the complexity to the back-end; they made it so simple the user really couldn't screw anything up. That's also why ChatGPT got so far so fast: input box, type something, complexity mostly hidden.
ineedasername 1y ago
What is their definition of adoption? A company where every employee has some level of access to AI is the bare minimum of “full adoption” for a given company but a threadbare one. A company that has implemented most current AI technologies in their applicable areas in known-functionally capabilities? That is a vastly larger definition of Full Adoption. It's the different between access and full utilization. The gulf is massive. And I'm not aware of any major company, or really any, that have said, "yep, we're done, we're doing everything we think we can with AI and we're not going to try to improve upon it." Implementation of acquired capabilities, implementations... Very early days. And it appears this study's definition is more like user access, not completed implementations. Somewhat annoyingly, I receive 3 or 4 calls a day, sometimes on weekends, from contracting firms looking for leads, TPMs, ML/Data scientists with genai / workflow experience. 3 months ago, without having done anything to put my name out any more that however it had been found before that, I was only getting 1 ever day or two. I don't think this study is using a useful definition for what they intend to measure. It is certainly not capturing more than a fraction of activity.
- prmph 1y ago
  Does it really matter? In this case, it is the perception that matters. If companies feel that AI is not quite as helpful as they thought it might, even if they have not maxed out what they theoretically could do with it, then that is all that matter in trying to get sense of where this might go
  - ineedasername 1y ago
    That's the thing: companies don't feel this way. They are entering their next implementation stages. These aren't new projects I'm getting called about, they're one that are just past the design and foundation stage, on to inplmentation. Whatever you want to call that, the general message is "yep, this direction, but keep going further"
pinkmuffinere 1y ago
What a shitty plot. Here are the sins I count: 1. No y axis label. 2. It supposedly plots a “rate”, but the time interval is unspecified. Per second? Per month? Per year? Intuitively my best guess is that the rate is per-year. However that would imply the second plot believes we are very near to 100% adoption, which I think we know is false. So what is this? Some esoteric time interval like bi-yearly? 3. More likely, it is not a rate at all, but instead a plot of total adoption. In this case, the title is chosen _very_ poorly. The author of the plot probably doesn’t know what they’re looking at. 4. Without grid lines, it’s very hard to read the data in the middle of the plot.
- kbelder 1y ago
  There is no need for a 'rate' to be against a time interval. The conversion rate of an email is purchases / emails sent. The fatality rate of a disease is casualties / people infected. It really just means a ratio.
  - mcswell 1y ago
    Ok, but in this case, a ration between what and what?
    - kbelder 1y ago
      The number of businesses that adopted AI versus the number of businesses.
lmf4lol 1y ago
The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it anymore for writing, I don't use it anymore for talking about philosophy, etc. And I use 0 agents. even though I am (was) the author of multiple MCP servers. It's just all too brittle and too annoying. I feel exhausted when talking to much to those "things".... I am also so bored of all those crap papers being published about LLM. Sometimes, there are some gems but its all so low-effort. LLM papers bore the hell out of me... Anyway, By cutting out AI for most of my stuff, I really improved my well-being. I found the joy back in manual programming, because I am one of the few soon that will actually understand stuff :-). I found the joy in writing with a fountain pen in a notebook and since then, I retain so much more information. Also a great opportunity for the future, when the majority will be dumbed down even more. And for philosophical interaction. I joined an online University and just read the actual books of the great thinkers and discuss them with people and knowledgable teachers. For what I use AI still is to correct my sentences (sometimes) :-). It's kinda the same than when I cut all(!) Social Media a while ago. It was such a great feeling to finally get rid ot all those mind-screwing algorithms. I don't blame anyone if they use AI. Do what you like.
- ciconia 1y ago
  > I don't use it anymore for coding I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using coding agents, and why did you stop?
  - estebarb 1y ago
    I cannot talk for OP, but I have been researching ways to make ML models learn faster, which obviously is a path that will be full of funny failures. I'm not able to use ChatGPT or Gemini to edit my code, because they will just replace my formulas with SimCLR and call it done.
    - RealityVoid 1y ago
      That's it, these machines don't have an original thought in there. They have a lot of data so they seem like they know stuff, they clearly know stuff you don't.But go off the beaten path and they gently but annoyingly try to steer you back. And that's fine for some things. Horrible if you want to do non-conventional things.
maxlamb 1y ago
Why would they not define what adoption rate mean? And why is “Ramp AI adoption rates” 3-4x just “AI adoption rates”?
par 1y ago
As an early and enthusiastic adopter of ChatGPT, LLMs, GANs etc, I gotta say: my ChatGPT is wrong a LOT. At first, somehow, it was tolerable. But now the hallucinations are getting very annoying and no longer quirky or funny, they’re frustrating and I have little patience for it.
- ares623 1y ago
  It’s ok a second LLM will do double checks
mancerayder 1y ago
Has anyone tried asking the exact same product questions to both ChatGPT 5.1 and Gemini? I did this twice today with wildly different results. In one case I was comparing capabilities and suggestions on audio equipment, being very specific in the setup, the models, and my goals. It was completely different in the results. I was comparing objective metrics and product specifications. I plan on doing this every time now because ChatGPT gets things wrong constantly, apologizes and changes its facts, while Gemini is cheerful and positive like a salesperson. These things have given me tremendous doubt after one year of usage.
Madmallard 1y ago
The most valuable skills in the software world are engineering skills and systems level thinking. None of the tools make the difference. The thinking is what matters.
dappsprogram 1y ago
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193 points by toomuchtodo 1y ago

Given the charts, that’s a ridiculous claim. Just compare early 2024 in the first chart, for example. It’s way too early to decide whether it’s flattening out.

scotty79 1y ago
Especially interesting is the adoption by the smallest companies. This means people find it still increasingly useful at the grassroot level where things are actually done. At larger companies adoption will probably stop at the level where managers will start to be threatened.
- crote 1y ago
  But what does that grassroot adoption look like in practice? Is that a developer spending $250/month on Claude, or is it a local corner shop using it once a month to replace their clip art flyer with AI slop, and the example contract they previously found via Google with some legalese gobbledygook ChatGPT hallucinated? Giving AI away for free to people who don't give a rat's ass about the quality of its output isn't very difficult. But that's not exactly going to pay your datacenter bill...
malisper 1y ago
Three consecutive months of decline starts to look more like a trend. Unless you think there's a transient issue causing the decline, something fundamental has changed
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  Again: compare early 2024. And that’s not the only thing; the second chart shows a possible flattening, but by no means certain yet, especially not when taken with the clear March–April jump; and the first chart shows no dwindling in 1–4, and clear recovery in 250+. The lie is easily put to the claim the article makes: > Data from the Census Bureau and Ramp shows that AI adoption rates are starting to flatten out across all firm sizes, see charts below. It’s flat-out nonsense, and anyone with any experience in this kind of statistics can see it.
raincole 1y ago
It's just printing headlines out of nothing. If it tried to answer why the two graphs show such different numbers (one ~14%, the other ~55%) I'd be more interested. > Note: Data is six-survey moving average. The survey is conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US Census Bureau, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist > Note: Ramp Al Index measures the adoption rate of artificial intelligence products and services among American businesses. The sample includes more than 40,000 American businesses and billions of dollars in corporate spend using data from Ramp’s corporate card and bill pay platform. Sources: Ramp, Bloomberg, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist It seems that the real interesting thing to see here is that the companies using Ramp are extremely atypical.

captainkrtek 1y ago

No no, we just need to put even more money in.

ajkjk 1y ago

Adoption = number of users Adoption rate = first derivative Flattening adoption rate = the second derivative is negative Starting to flatten = the third derivative is negative I don't think anyone cares what the third derivative of something is when the first derivative could easily change by a macroscopic amount overnight.

scotty79 1y ago
Not really. In this context adoption might be number of users. But adoption rate is a fraction of users that adopted this to all users.
- ajkjk 1y ago
  Hm that's true. Both seem plausible in English. I didn't look closely enough to figure out which they meant.
postexitus 1y ago
Adoption rate is not derivative of Adoption. Rate of change is. Adoption rate is the percentage of uptake (there, same order with Adoption itself). It being flattening means first derivative is getting close to 0.
- amelius 1y ago
  The function log(x) also has derivative that goes closer and closer to 0. However lim x->inf log(x) is still inf.
  - lkey 1y ago
    Is it your assertion that an 'infinite' percentage! of the businesses will use AI on a long enough time scale? If you need everything to be math, at least have the courtesy to use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function and not unbounded logarithmic curves when referring to on our very finite world.
- 1y ago

xgulfie 1y ago

If I was openAI or whatever I would be investing in circular partnerships with claude or whatever, claim agentic use should be considered the same as real users, then have each other's LLM systems use each other and finally achieve infinite, uncapped user growth

mancerayder 1y ago
That could be argued to be a fraudulent approach to juicing metrics.
- xgulfie 1y ago
  I wasn't suggesting lying about it

anon191928 1y ago

so no expot. growth? who would have guess? /s

malisper 1y ago

From the chart, the percentage of companies using AI has been going down over the past couple of months That's a massive deal because the AI companies today are valued on the assumption that they'll 10x their revenue over the next couple of years. If their revenue growth starts to slow down, their valuations will change to reflect that

adventured 1y ago
This bubble phase will play out just as the previous have in tech: consolidation, most of the value creation will go to a small group of companies. Most will die, some will thrive. Companies like Anthropic will not survive as an independent. They won't come close to having enough revenue & profit to sustain their operating costs (they're Lyft to Google or OpenAI's Uber, Anthropic will never reach the scale needed to roll over to significant profit generation). Its fair value is 1/10th or less what it's being valued at currently (yes because I say so). Anthropic's valuation will implode to reconcile that, as the market for AI does. Some larger company will scoop them up during the pain phase, once they get desperate enough to sell. When the implosion of the speculative hype is done, the real value creation will begin thereafter. Over the following two or three decades a radical amount of value will be generated by AI collectively, far beyond anything seen during this hype phase. A lot of lesser AI companies will follow the same path as Anthropic.

simonw 1y ago

Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025: https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down-for-large-companies/ https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... - their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies". I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and some uploaded census data: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/ Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter/#something-much-harder-recreating-the-ai-adoption-chart https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...

runako 1y ago

Without weighing in on the accuracy of this claim, this would be an expected part of the maturity cycle. Compare to databases. You could probably have plotted a chart of database adoption rates in the '90s as small companies started running e.g. Lotus Notes, FoxPro and SQL server everywhere to build in-house CRMs and back-office apps. Those companies still operate those functions, but now most small businesses do not run databases themselves. Why manage SQL Server when you can just pay for Salesforce and Notion with predictable monthly spend? (All of this is more complex, but analogous at larger companies.) My take is the big rise in AI adoption, if it arrives, will similarly be embedded inside application functions.

ghaff 1y ago
People push back against comments like these. But, as you suggest, the win isn't about individual developers potentially increasing their productivity by some inflated amount. It's about baking more prediction and automation into more tools that people who aren't developers use. Which is probably part of where the general meme of lack of interest in entry level programmers come from.
- runako 1y ago
  Actually surprising when programmers (especially) push back. A couple years ago, people were doing copy/paste from ChatGPT to their IDEs. Now, they generally work at a higher level of abstraction in dedicated tools like Coded or Cursor. Why would other functions prefer the copy/paste lifestyle?

thesumofall 1y ago

They show two different surveys that are supposed to show the same underlying truth but differ by a factor of 3x? For the Ramp survey: why the sudden jump from 30% to 50% in March? For the Census one: How could it possibly be that only 12% of companies with more than 250 people „adopted“ (whatever that means) AI? It would be interesting if it were true but these charts don’t make any sense at all to me

tripletao 1y ago
The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services". I guess that's intended to exclude not-yet-productive investigations, and maybe also indirect uses--does LLM-powered OCR for the expense reports for the travelling sales representatives for a widget factory count? That's all vague enough that I guess it works mostly as a sentiment check, where the absolute value isn't meaningful but the time trend might be. The Ramp chart seems to use actual payment information from companies using their accounting platform. That should be more objective, though they don't disclose much about their methodology (and their customers aren't necessarily representative, the purpose and intensity of use aren't captured at all, etc.). https://ramp.com/data/ai-index https://ramp.com/data/ai-index
- ac29 1y ago
  > The Census Bureau asks if firms are using AI "to help produce goods or services" That's odd. I use AI tools at work occasionally, but since our business involves selling physical goods, I guess we would not count as an AI adopter in this survey.
  - tripletao 1y ago
    After more investigation, I'm not sure what question was asked. I quoted that exact language from Apollo, and the Census Bureau uses very similar language in the spreadsheet with the aggregated responses, at https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/Employment%20Size%20Class.xlsx https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/Employment%20Size%... I'm unable to find a questionnaire with that language, though. I found a different questionnaire with many AI-related questions, some of which I believe would usefully capture both your situation and my hypothetical above. None closely match that language, though. The closest might be question 23, but that asks about use "in any of its business functions". https://www2.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/business-trends-and-outlook-survey/questionnaire-ai-supplement.pdf https://www2.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/busi...

sublinear 1y ago

I'm more interested in what the implications are for the economy and what this next AI winter looks like. What happens to all the debt? Was all this just for chatbots that are finally barely good enough for satnav and image gen that does slightly better photoshop that the layperson can use?

7moritz7 1y ago

The least volatile dataset, employee count 1-4 businesses, is steadily climbing in adoption. I feel like as long as the smallest businesses (so the most agile, non-enterprise software ones) increase in adoption, other sizes will follow.

mattas 1y ago

Not to be lost, but the first chart is actually a 3-month moving average. Surprised they buried that in the notes and didn't simply include it in the chart title. "Note: Data is six-survey moving average. The survey is conducted bi-weekly. Sources: US Census Bureau, Macrobond, Apollo Chief Economist"

whinvik 1y ago

I think what is happening is that people are realizing AI is not just plug and play. It can do amazing things but needs engineering around it. I think what will happen is in parallel more products will be built that address the engineering challenges and the models will keep getting better. I don't know though if that will lead to another hockey stick or just slow and steady.

emp17344 1y ago

My guess is AI will find niches where it provides productivity boosts, but won’t be as useful in the majority of fields. Right now, AI works pretty well for coding, and doesn’t really excel anywhere else. It’s not looking like it will get good enough to disrupt the economy at large.

mwkaufma 1y ago
Aside from financially-motivated "testimonials," there's no broad evidence that it even works that well for coding, with many studies even showing the opposite. Damning with faint praise.
- turtletontine 1y ago
  I think what’s clear is many people feel much more productive coding with LLMs, but perceived and actual productivity don’t necessarily correlate. I’m sure results vary quite a bit. My hunch is that long term value might be quite low: a few years into vibe coding huge projects, developers might hit a wall with a mountain of slop code they can no longer manage or understand. There was an article here recently titled “vibe code is legacy code” which made a similar argument. Again, results surely vary wildly
  - mwkaufma 1y ago
    It feels like it's creating economic activity in the tech sector the same way that walking down the street and smashing everyone's windshields would create economic activity for local auto shops.
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  It depends on a lot of things. I know JavaScript on a pretty surface level, but I can use Claude to wire up react and tailwind, and then my experience with all the other programming I’ve done gives me enough intuition to clean it up. That helps me turn rough things into usable tools that can be reused or deployed in small scale. That’s a productivity increase for sure. It has not helped me with the problems that I need to spend 2-5 days just thinking about and wrapping my head around solutions to. Even if it does come up with solutions that pass tests, they still need to be scrutinized and rewritten. But the small tasks it’s good at add up to being worth the price tag for a subscription.

adventured 1y ago

The average person has no idea what to use AI for to get substantial value out of what it can now do. It's the switch between: know which service to use, consider capabilities, try to get AI to do a thing, if you even have a thing that needs done that it can do; versus: AI just does a thing for you, requiring little to no thought. Very active vs very passive. Use will go up in direct relation to that changeover. The super users are already at peak, they're fully engaged. A software developer wants a very active relationship with their AI; Joe Average does not. The complexity has to vanish entirely. It's the difference between hiding the extraordinary engineering that is Google search behind a simple input box, and making users select a hundred settings before firing off a search. Imagine if the average search user needed to know something meaningful about the capabilities of Google search or search in general, before using it. Prime Google search (~1998-2016) obliterated the competition (including the portals) with that one simple search box, by shifting all the complexity to the back-end; they made it so simple the user really couldn't screw anything up. That's also why ChatGPT got so far so fast: input box, type something, complexity mostly hidden.

ineedasername 1y ago

What is their definition of adoption? A company where every employee has some level of access to AI is the bare minimum of “full adoption” for a given company but a threadbare one. A company that has implemented most current AI technologies in their applicable areas in known-functionally capabilities? That is a vastly larger definition of Full Adoption. It's the different between access and full utilization. The gulf is massive. And I'm not aware of any major company, or really any, that have said, "yep, we're done, we're doing everything we think we can with AI and we're not going to try to improve upon it." Implementation of acquired capabilities, implementations... Very early days. And it appears this study's definition is more like user access, not completed implementations. Somewhat annoyingly, I receive 3 or 4 calls a day, sometimes on weekends, from contracting firms looking for leads, TPMs, ML/Data scientists with genai / workflow experience. 3 months ago, without having done anything to put my name out any more that however it had been found before that, I was only getting 1 ever day or two. I don't think this study is using a useful definition for what they intend to measure. It is certainly not capturing more than a fraction of activity.

prmph 1y ago
Does it really matter? In this case, it is the perception that matters. If companies feel that AI is not quite as helpful as they thought it might, even if they have not maxed out what they theoretically could do with it, then that is all that matter in trying to get sense of where this might go
- ineedasername 1y ago
  That's the thing: companies don't feel this way. They are entering their next implementation stages. These aren't new projects I'm getting called about, they're one that are just past the design and foundation stage, on to inplmentation. Whatever you want to call that, the general message is "yep, this direction, but keep going further"

pinkmuffinere 1y ago

What a shitty plot. Here are the sins I count: 1. No y axis label. 2. It supposedly plots a “rate”, but the time interval is unspecified. Per second? Per month? Per year? Intuitively my best guess is that the rate is per-year. However that would imply the second plot believes we are very near to 100% adoption, which I think we know is false. So what is this? Some esoteric time interval like bi-yearly? 3. More likely, it is not a rate at all, but instead a plot of total adoption. In this case, the title is chosen _very_ poorly. The author of the plot probably doesn’t know what they’re looking at. 4. Without grid lines, it’s very hard to read the data in the middle of the plot.

kbelder 1y ago
There is no need for a 'rate' to be against a time interval. The conversion rate of an email is purchases / emails sent. The fatality rate of a disease is casualties / people infected. It really just means a ratio.
- mcswell 1y ago
  Ok, but in this case, a ration between what and what?
  - kbelder 1y ago
    The number of businesses that adopted AI versus the number of businesses.

lmf4lol 1y ago

The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it anymore for writing, I don't use it anymore for talking about philosophy, etc. And I use 0 agents. even though I am (was) the author of multiple MCP servers. It's just all too brittle and too annoying. I feel exhausted when talking to much to those "things".... I am also so bored of all those crap papers being published about LLM. Sometimes, there are some gems but its all so low-effort. LLM papers bore the hell out of me... Anyway, By cutting out AI for most of my stuff, I really improved my well-being. I found the joy back in manual programming, because I am one of the few soon that will actually understand stuff :-). I found the joy in writing with a fountain pen in a notebook and since then, I retain so much more information. Also a great opportunity for the future, when the majority will be dumbed down even more. And for philosophical interaction. I joined an online University and just read the actual books of the great thinkers and discuss them with people and knowledgable teachers. For what I use AI still is to correct my sentences (sometimes) :-). It's kinda the same than when I cut all(!) Social Media a while ago. It was such a great feeling to finally get rid ot all those mind-screwing algorithms. I don't blame anyone if they use AI. Do what you like.

ciconia 1y ago
> I don't use it anymore for coding I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using coding agents, and why did you stop?
- estebarb 1y ago
  I cannot talk for OP, but I have been researching ways to make ML models learn faster, which obviously is a path that will be full of funny failures. I'm not able to use ChatGPT or Gemini to edit my code, because they will just replace my formulas with SimCLR and call it done.
  - RealityVoid 1y ago
    That's it, these machines don't have an original thought in there. They have a lot of data so they seem like they know stuff, they clearly know stuff you don't.But go off the beaten path and they gently but annoyingly try to steer you back. And that's fine for some things. Horrible if you want to do non-conventional things.

maxlamb 1y ago

Why would they not define what adoption rate mean? And why is “Ramp AI adoption rates” 3-4x just “AI adoption rates”?

par 1y ago

As an early and enthusiastic adopter of ChatGPT, LLMs, GANs etc, I gotta say: my ChatGPT is wrong a LOT. At first, somehow, it was tolerable. But now the hallucinations are getting very annoying and no longer quirky or funny, they’re frustrating and I have little patience for it.

ares623 1y ago
It’s ok a second LLM will do double checks

mancerayder 1y ago

Has anyone tried asking the exact same product questions to both ChatGPT 5.1 and Gemini? I did this twice today with wildly different results. In one case I was comparing capabilities and suggestions on audio equipment, being very specific in the setup, the models, and my goals. It was completely different in the results. I was comparing objective metrics and product specifications. I plan on doing this every time now because ChatGPT gets things wrong constantly, apologizes and changes its facts, while Gemini is cheerful and positive like a salesperson. These things have given me tremendous doubt after one year of usage.

Madmallard 1y ago

The most valuable skills in the software world are engineering skills and systems level thinking. None of the tools make the difference. The thinking is what matters.

dappsprogram 1y ago

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