AI Adoption tells Two separate Stories
Real world lag in AI adoption is worse than BigTech wants you to know. Are Vertical AI apps the solution?
Good Morning,
Recently there’s been a slew of new products and models released in the AI world, some of those are on my radar include in no particular order:
Product Radar 📡 in LLMs & Agents
MiniMax Agent (desktop) - An AI-native workspace.
Qwen3-Max Thinking by Alibaba. via Tongyi Lab - see Blog
Moltbot (formerly Clawbot) your AI Personal Assistant via Peter Steinberger (Watch ▶️)
Moonshot AI’s Kimi-2.5. (officially released as Kimi K2.5 in late January 2026, bringing parallel agent swarms to reasoning)
Qwen’s DeepPlanning Benchmark. - Read about it (measures long-horizon agent planning)
Anthropic’s Claude’s New Constitution (Structure & Critique)
OpenAI’s Prism
Anthropic launches interactive MCP Apps, bringing live tool UIs directly into chats
DeepSeek publishes OCR 2 as an open-source model with structural reordering
Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM called Trinity (see on Github)
Ai2 launches SERA for low cost training of coding agents: Open Coding Agents: Fast, accessible coding agents that adapt to any repo
Cohere launches Model Vault
Genspark Launches AI Workspace 2.0 - an autonomous, voice-driven productivity platform that uses "Sparkies" (AI agents) to complete complex research and workflows automatically.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on: “The Adolescence of Technology” - Read it
What the AI Adoption!
I wanted to really geek out about AI adoption, or the lack therefore in the Generative AI hype craze.
It’s been three years since ChatGPT launched, and a full seven a half years since the Google paper that started it all. If AI was this transformative technology, wouldn’t you expect more people and workers to be using it more actively?
While workers and even knowledge workers are under a lot of pressure to use AI at work, many of them are not doing so with real conviction or have concerns of the quality, ethics and efficiency of doing so.
I wanted to take a look at several of the recent surveys and reports on AI adoption to try to get a read on the reality in early 2026.
The total percentage of employees using AI remains flat, but use varies meaningfully by industry and role type (Gallup Poll).
The cited Gallup Workforce survey was conducted this fall of more than 22,000 U.S. workers.
I will do my best to cite my sources and display a variety of infographics along with my own notes.
As of November 2025, 12% of U.S. employees use AI daily in their role
Many professionals don’t actually feel comfortable using AI in their professional role however.
Professionals Report Low Comfort in using AI at Work
As of August 2025, just 9% of U.S. employees say they are “very comfortable” using AI in their role.
A Tale of Two Countries (Cities)
AI is now driving a semi-perma K-shaped U.S. economy. A fraction of consumers at the top are driving spending in the economy and the main driver of GDP, the datacenter rollout of capex at all costs benefits mostly a few companies at the top. What does that mean really?
