It would be hard--perhaps literally impossible--to find any forecasts of 5G or artificial intelligence adoption that do not slope upwards and to the right. What often matters quite a deal to ecosystem stakeholders, though, is how many years elapse before the curve hits some clear inflection point.
The reason is obvious: firms want to create products for the market before it hits the inflection point, and not “too early or too late.” Perhaps 5G is not so much the issue, as deployments already have begun, so charting progress is fairly easy.
The various forms of AI are harder, in part because AI is a capability that will be incorporated into many products. Customers will not be “buying AI” so much as some other solution to a business problem. And for all the hype, few business managers yet report they are using AI.
A study by the U.S. Census Bureau, for example, finds that firms reporting they already use AI in any form (often machine learning) are less than three percent of respondents.
A rule of thumb about technology adoption therefore suggests we are about seven percentage points of adoption away from an inflection point virtually everyone expects will happen. So why seven points?
Most useful advanced technologies tend not to go mainstream until adoption reaches about 10 percent. That is where the inflection point tends to occur. That essentially represents adoption by innovators and early adopters.
One often sees charts that suggest popular and important technology innovations are adopted quite quickly. That is almost always an exaggeration. The issue is where to start the clock running: at the point of invention or at the point of commercial introduction? Starting from invention, adoption takes quite some time to reach 10 percent adoption, even if it later seems as though it happened faster.
Consider mobile phone use. On a global basis, it took more than 20 years for usage to reach close to 10 percent of people.
That is worth keeping in mind when thinking about, or trying to predict, advanced technology adoption. It usually takes longer than one believes for any important and useful innovation to reach 10-percent adoption.
The bottom line is that if the classical curves hold, the inflection point for AI adoption will happen when surveys report that 10 percent of respondents are aware they have bought and are using AI solutions.
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