The tip of the spear
If true, this chart above puts the entire AI conversation into perspective. Each dot represents roughly 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots for 8.1 billion humans. The red ones, 84% of the total, have never used AI. Not once. The yellow dots are free chatbot users, about 1.3 billion people. The green dots, the ones paying $20 a month for AI tools, are 15 to 25 million people. That's 0.3%. And the ones using AI for coding? Two to five million. 0.04%.
That's the entire AI revolution. A rounding error.
I'm in the black dots. I use AI for coding every day. I pay for multiple subscriptions. I've integrated it so deeply into my workflow that I forget what it was like before. And looking at this chart, I have to remind myself how unusual that is. Most people on earth have never typed a prompt.
The market is barely open
I keep catching myself thinking the AI space is crowded. Every week there's a new agent, a new wrapper, a new copilot. But all of that competition is fighting over roughly 0.3% of the world's population. The other 99.7% haven't even started.
A market serving roughly 0.3% of the world's population has barely opened.
I need to remember this when I'm thinking about what to build. There's a real opportunity in making this technology useful to the thousands of people in any given town or city who don't know what a prompt is and shouldn't need to. The interfaces haven't been built yet. The use cases haven't been discovered. The products that reach the next wave of users look nothing like what I'm using today.
It could genuinely help
I'm motivated by the chance to make this technology useful beyond the people already paying for it.
A lot of what AI can do is already possible if you know how to use a chatbot. But most people don't, and they shouldn't have to. The real gap is in products that solve specific problems without asking users to learn prompting. A tool that handles VAT returns for a sole trader. An app that monitors a crop and tells a farmer when to act. Software that helps a small landlord stay on top of compliance without paying an agent.
A chatbot is the wrong product shape for these problems, and most of the solutions haven't been built yet.
Keep your eyes open
None of this is news to anyone reading it, but I needed to write it down for myself.
I need to look beyond the 0.3% who already get it and pay attention to people with a problem AI could solve without ever needing to know what a prompt is.