Making AI popular is a marathon, not a sprint

AI is everywhere, but from where I sit, there are some strong signals that suggest the road to AI Everywhere is going to be a long-distance endurance race, rather than a sprint.

While these tools are seeing a lot of use since ChatGPT burst upon the scene, they are also generating lots of cost — and despite all the marketing, it still isn’t really clear if consumers are buying hardware based on ‘AI Inside.’ (Though it is already clear that workers are using AI in the shadows).

Even iPhone users — usually the fastest adopters of cutting-edge tech — seem to want convincing that AI is all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s almost as if people purchasing these products are a little turned off by a technology that threatens to destroy their employment, exacerbate wealth inequalities, and supercharge surveillance advertising in exchange for email summaries and a search engine powerful enough to help you file your next welfare benefit claim. 

Who could have seen that coming?

When it comes to tech, consumers have developed a resistance to the new. They’ve seen both bank accounts and politics hacked by technologies originally sold to them under the promise of making things better, and they are annoyed that the ad-free streaming television they began paying for now comes with added ads. They’ve seen this happen again and again, as a result of which they are suspicious of new tech — even when it is private and trusted like the AI that Apple is promising to provide. 

Why do I think this?

A recent survey of 2,000 US smartphone users by trade-in site SellCell found that 73% of iPhone users and 87% of Samsung users say the AI features they have been provided with in the latest software updates are adding little or no value. Samsung introduced its first genAI smartphone in March this year, while Apple rolled out Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 in October.

The survey was taken before Apple introduced iOS 18.2, and while it can’t be seen as representative, I think it shows that the expectation that AI will somehow deliver a big bump in device and PC sales may be misplaced — though server sales will see a big spike as service providers and businesses implement AI in their systems.

This doesn’t mean iPhone users aren’t interested in AI. Among iOS users who responded to the SellCell survey, 47.6% called it “key” in choosing a new phone; just 23.7% of Samsung users felt the same way. It may also matter that 21.1% of smartphone users already see AI as a very important deciding factor when choosing a new device.

What are the most popular AI features on phones?

While the survey does show there’s some journey to go before the promise of AI resonates fully with its audience, it also reveals which of the features made available in iOS 18.1 (pre-Genmoji) most interested users: Writing Tools (72%), Notification summaries (54%), Priority Messages (44.5%), Clean Up in Photos (29.1%), and Smart Reply in Mail and Messages (20.9%).

For comparison, Samsung AI users checked out thusly: Circle to Search (82.1%), Photo Assist (55.5%), Chat Assist (28.8%), Note Assist (17.4%), and Browsing Assist (11.6%).

It’s clear that Apple’s decision to Sherlock Grammarly (and do it privately) has given the company its most attractive suite of AI tools. People like tools that help them do everyday things better, it seems.

That desire for enhanced productivity is also what is driving employees to use AI services for their work, sometimes to the detriment of security policies and customer privacy.

At this stage in AI deployment, consumers still need convincing, and companies still need time to think about how best to deploy the tech — though a recent CCS Insight survey of business leaders showed that 82% are in the process of deployment. We are early in the mass adoption curve, and in that environment, taking a cautious and deliberate stance to adoption seems to be the best way to avoid falling into any unexpected disasters. Which is, oddly enough, how Apple has been approaching the topic since the get-go.

Will you pay for AI?

While I don’t see platform-wide AI as anything like the same animal as the fast-growing assemblage of customized focused AI services for specific industries and tasks, it still feels like the opportunity to monetize general purpose mass-market AI services remains some way off. 

Apple users are a little more ready. 

They are a lot more likely to consider investing in AI subscriptions (which may yet justify OpenAI’s gamble to offer its services through Apple’s kit), but subscription is a trickle, rather than a flood. The survey tells us 11.6% of them are likely to pay for a subscription to use AI services, in contrast to just 4% of Samsung users. 

However, most smartphone users (86.5% of iPhone users and 94.5% of Samsung users) said they would not pay to use AI. 

The decision seems pretty polarized in that just 1.9% of Apple users aren’t sure if they’d pay or not — in other words, there’s a pretty clear division between the two sides. That means the task of convincing people to adopt is already entirely based on showing those refuseniks compelling usage cases that help them come to terms with, trust, and develop the desire to use AI in some way.

Gathering the tribes

Eroding this resistance and bestowing these services with an increased perception of value will clearly be part of the product management journey for Apple AI, and every other kind of artificial intelligence. It may well be that as the uses of these tools become more widespread, people’s enthusiasm will increase. It is worth noting that at some point prior to the introduction of Apple Intelligence, some reports were claiming that some inside Apple themselves remained uncertain if the first echelon of tools to ship would resonate with consumers.

They may find themselves slightly relieved that while AI features don’t seem to grab the attention of every iPhone user, the ones who are making use of the tools seem pretty enthusiastic. iPhone users are also trying the new AI services as they appear, with 41.6% of those owning an iPhone that supports them confirming they’d used them, mostly writing tools, notification summaries, and priority messages.  

What does this tell us? 

I think it tells us that the current trend of just waving at a gadget that happens to support genAI and calling it an “AI smartphone” or an “AI PC” — or, in Apple’s case, a “complete mobile to PC AI ecosystem” — may need to be refined.

People need to feel more trust in these solutions, want to be convinced that potential damaging use is mitigated against, and most of all want applied use cases in which the tech can be applied in positive, life-enhancing ways. It’s also possible that the hype of AI is already behind us, and that now the search must shift to identifying those compelling instances in which the tech addresses significant human need. 

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