An effective AI strategy pairs a central task force for enablement—handling approvals, compliance, and awareness—with empowerment of frontline staff. The best, most elegant applications of AI will be identified by those doing the day-to-day work.

Unlike previous tech waves that trickled down from large institutions, AI adoption is inverted. Individuals are the fastest adopters, followed by small businesses, with large corporations and governments lagging. This reverses the traditional power dynamic of technology access and creates new market opportunities.

The massive TAM expansion for AI relies on shifting spend from labor to technology budgets. This shift won't happen because of top-down CIO mandates. It must be driven by bottom-up product pull, where the value proposition is so overwhelmingly clear that customers are compelled to adopt it.

Unlike previous top-down technology waves (e.g., mainframes), AI is being adopted bottom-up. Individuals and small businesses are the first adopters, while large companies and governments lag due to bureaucracy. This gives a massive speed advantage to smaller, more agile players.

Enterprises face hurdles like security and bureaucracy when implementing AI. Meanwhile, individuals are rapidly adopting tools on their own, becoming more productive. This creates bottom-up pressure on organizations to adopt AI, as empowered employees set new performance standards and prove the value case.

AI adoption in healthcare has accelerated by sidestepping slow enterprise sales cycles. Companies like Open Evidence offer free, consumer-like apps directly to doctors (prosumers). This bottom-up approach creates widespread use, forcing organizations to adopt the technology once a critical mass of their staff is already using it.

Casado asserts that current AI is an individual prosumer technology. Corporate AI projects often fail because they misapply it. The immediate organizational value comes from the aggregate productivity gains of employees using consumer AI tools like ChatGPT on their own.

Nadella predicts AI's enterprise adoption will be two-pronged. While executives will push top-down projects with clear ROI, the real transformation will be bottom-up. Individual employees will build their own agents to eliminate drudgery, just as lawyers adopted Word and finance teams adopted Excel, making the tools indispensable.

According to OpenAI's Head of Applications, their enterprise success is directly fueled by their consumer product's ubiquity. When employees already use and trust ChatGPT personally, it dramatically simplifies enterprise deployment, adoption, and training, creating a powerful consumer-led growth loop that traditional B2B companies lack.