AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
22 comments
·November 28, 2025ajkjk
tarsinge
I don’t understand, how can adoption rate change overnight if its derivative is negative? Trying to draw a parallel to get intuition, if adoption is distance, adoption rate speed, and the derivative of adoption rate is acceleration, then if I was pedal to the floor but then release the pedal and start braking, I’ll not lose the distance gained (adoption) but my acceleration will flatten then get negative and my speed (adoption rate) will ultimately get to 0 right? Seems pretty significant for an industry built on 2030 projections.
postexitus
Adoption rate is not derivative of Adoption. Rate of change is. Adoption rate is the percentage of uptake (there, same order with Adoption itself). It being flattening means first derivative is getting close to 0.
brianshaler
It maps pretty cleanly to the well understood derivatives of a position vector. Position (user count), velocity (first derivative, change in user count over time), acceleration (second derivative, speeding up or flattening of the velocity), and jerk (third derivative, change in acceleration such as the shift between from acceleration to deceleration)
It really is a beautiful title.
postexitus
It is not velocity, it is not change. Have you read the graphs? What do you think 12% in Aug and Sep for 250+ Employee companies mean, that another 12% of companies adopted AI or is it a flat "12% of the companies have adopted in Aug, and it did not change in Sep"
dragonwriter
> Adoption = number of users
> Adoption rate = first derivative
If you mean with respect to time, wrong. The denonimator in adoption rate that makes it a “rate” is the number of existing businesses, not time. It is adoption scaled to the universe of businesses, not the rate of change of adoption over time.
LPisGood
The adoption rate is the rate of adoption over time.
kordlessagain
You could use that logic to dismiss any analysis of any trajectory ever.
Perfectly excusable post that says absolutely nothing about anything.
crote
Looking at the graphs in the linked article, a more accurate title would probably be "AI adoption has stagnated" - which a lot of people are going to care about.
Corporate AI adoption looks to be hitting a plateau, and adoption in large companies is even shrinking. The only market still showing growth is companies with fewer than 5 employees - and even there it's only linear growth.
Considering our economy is pumping billions into the AI industry, that's pretty bad news. If the industry isn't rapidly growing, why are they building all those data centers? Are they just setting money on fire in a desperate attempt to keep their share price from plummeting?
silveraxe93
While there's an extreme amount of hype around AI, it seems there's an equal amount of demand for signs that it's a bubble or it's slowing down.
runako
Without weighing in on the accuracy of this claim, this would be an expected part of the maturity cycle.
Compare to databases. You could probably have plotted a chart of database adoption rates in the '90s as small companies started running e.g. Lotus Notes, FoxPro and SQL server everywhere to build in-house CRMs and back-office apps. Those companies still operate those functions, but now most small businesses do not run databases themselves. Why manage SQL Server when you can just pay for Salesforce and Notion with predictable monthly spend?
(All of this is more complex, but analogous at larger companies.)
My take is the big rise in AI adoption, if it arrives, will similarly be embedded inside application functions.
chrismorgan
Given the charts, that’s a ridiculous claim. Just compare early 2024 in the first chart, for example.
It’s way too early to decide whether it’s flattening out.
malisper
Three consecutive months of decline starts to look more like a trend. Unless you think there's a transient issue causing the decline, something fundamental has changed
scotty79
Especially interesting is the adoption by the smallest companies. This means people find it still increasingly useful at the grassroot level where things are actually done.
At larger companies adoption will probably stop at the level where managers will start to be threatened.
crote
But what does that grassroot adoption look like in practice? Is that a developer spending $250/month on Claude, or is it a local corner shop using it once a month to replace their clip art flyer with AI slop, and the example contract they previously found via Google with some legalese gobbledygook ChatGPT hallucinated?
Giving AI away for free to people who don't give a rat's ass about the quality of its output isn't very difficult. But that's not exactly going to pay your datacenter bill...
simonw
Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025: https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... - their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies".
I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and some uploaded census data: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/
Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...
xgulfie
If I was openAI or whatever I would be investing in circular partnerships with claude or whatever, claim agentic use should be considered the same as real users, then have each other's LLM systems use each other and finally achieve infinite, uncapped user growth
malisper
From the chart, the percentage of companies using AI has been going down over the past couple of months
That's a massive deal because the AI companies today are valued on the assumption that they'll 10x their revenue over the next couple of years. If their revenue growth starts to slow down, their valuations will change to reflect that
captainkrtek
No no, we just need to put even more money in.
anon191928
so no expot. growth? who would have guess?
/s
Adoption = number of users
Adoption rate = first derivative
Flattening adoption rate = the second derivative is negative
Starting to flatten = the third derivative is negative
I don't think anyone cares what the third derivative of something is when the first derivative could easily change by a macroscopic amount overnight.