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AI's adoption is splitting. For consumers, its diffusion is following a "normal" technology pattern, even facing pushback. Conversely, in professional settings, it's an "abnormal" force fundamentally changing how work is done, with users demanding faster updates and more powerful tools.

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Public discourse on AI often misses a key dichotomy. While consumer-facing AI products are widely disliked and fail to deliver value, AI has found significant product-market fit within the enterprise for tasks like coding and business process automation. This explains the disconnect between venture capital hype and public skepticism.

Contrary to expectations, professions that are typically slow to adopt new technology (medicine, law) are showing massive enthusiasm for AI. This is because it directly addresses their core need to reason with and manage large volumes of unstructured data, improving their daily work.

The AI industry's center of gravity has shifted from consumer applications to enterprise solutions. Meta is now an outlier with its consumer-first strategy, while even consumer-facing releases like new image models are valued primarily for their integration into work-related coding and design workflows.

Previous technology shifts like mobile or client-server were often pushed by technologists onto a hesitant market. In contrast, the current AI trend is being pulled by customers who are actively demanding AI features in their products, creating unprecedented pressure on companies to integrate them quickly.

People deeply involved in AI perceive its current capabilities as world-changing, while the general public, using free or basic tools, remains largely unaware of the imminent, profound disruption to knowledge work.

A small cohort of power users are achieving massive productivity gains with AI, while most companies are stuck at the most basic stages. This creates a widening competitive gap where firms that master simple access and training will dramatically outperform those mired in bureaucratic inertia.

A new technology's adoption depends on its fit with a profession's core tasks. Spreadsheets were an immediate revolution for accountants but a minor tool for lawyers. Similarly, generative AI is transformative for coders and marketers but struggles to find a daily use case in many other professions.

Contrary to the narrative that AI will reduce work hours, early adopters use agents to massively increase their output. They are working more, not less, because AI provides unprecedented leverage to accomplish more, faster. This suggests AI's primary effect is ambition amplification.

The true threshold for AI becoming a disruptive, "non-normal" technology is when it can perform the new jobs that emerge from increased productivity. This breaks the historical cycle of human job reallocation, representing a fundamental economic shift distinct from past technological waves.

Unlike COVID, which universally and immediately affected everyone, AI's disruption is gradual and highly sector-specific. A surgeon's job isn't changing this month, but a software engineer's is. The comparison creates misplaced urgency for many outside of tech.