# AI Product Adoption and Solidarity By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-01-16 Typically, new products follow a product adoption curve, often explained as the Law of Diffusion of Innovation. According to this law, some innovators or early adopters will hear about a product and quickly adopt it as a form of status. Once others see someone else using it, they will slowly begin to adopt it if it also offers them status or makes their life a little bit better. If enough people accept the product, even those highly resistant to the innovation will be forced to adopt it. Cell phones serve as a perfect example. Almost everyone has a cell phone in the US, even though in the beginning, only the richest of the rich had status indicating car phones the size of briefcases. As much as usefulness is necessary for a product's adoption, it is not nearly sufficient, as pointed out by the law. The product must also, in some way, be seen as raising a person's status within society. With physical products like phones, cars, and clothes, the status of the person and their products is relatively easy to see. Thus, these products follow the curve. However, what about products that cannot be seen but are extremely useful and help to elevate a person above someone else? For example, having an MBA from Harvard can't be seen, but it is highly beneficial in opening up doors in the business world. One's rich neighbor might primarily be rich because they adopted the MBA from Harvard without one knowing it. Now, think of what implications this has for those early adopters of AI technologies to do their work. If one uses all the latest AI technology to outperform one's peers without anyone knowing it, one has a significant advantage within the current work paradigm. The first movers have a huge advantage and can rise to the top or spend more time doing what they love versus grinding away on a strategy deck or entering data into a spreadsheet. What incentives do individuals have within the current work paradigm to share their tips and tricks for using AI? In short, they have none unless they wish to operate in solidarity with their peers. So, AI companies cannot rely upon traditional word-of-mouth product adoption strategies. Instead, they must invest heavily in sales and marketing to executives and organizations. One big problem here is the track record of big tech, which is always overselling and underdelivering. There is a trail of bubbles bursting all over the place. It seems to me that we are stuck in this endless cycle because of how workers are incentivized, and organizations operate. If AI ever rises to destroy us all, it won't be because it awakens on its own. It will happen because no one is looking at the systems and structures of how we work together for the greater good of humanity. #### Related Items [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Products]] [[Organization]] [[Paradigms]] [[Capitalism]] [[Incentives]] [[Status]] [[Power]] [[Society]]