The hype has a familiar ring. The iPhone's 2007 launch brought predictions of a mobile-first world, and Businessweek heralded a "New Economy" when broadband went mass-market. Robert Solow quipped that you could see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
The essay describes a double K-shaped pattern. The first split is between consumers and companies. Smartphones reached 80% of Americans in seven years. Enterprise resource planning systems took 33 years to reach 57% of U.S. Firms. Consumer AI use hit 53% of U.S. Adults barely three years after ChatGPT launched, but enterprise AI in productive deployment sits at 10%.
The second split is inside companies. McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey found 88% of organizations use AI in at least one function. Only 6% qualify as high performers with more than 5% EBIT impact, unchanged from 2025.
The author says that 82-point gap is an organizational transformation deficit, not a technology problem. The 6% are three times more likely to have redesigned workflows end-to-end, but only 21% of all adopters have done it. The stock market shows the same divide. Just 36 S&P 500 AI companies make up 45% of the index's market capitalization.
Over three years the S&P 500 returned 76%, and the essay says that number drops sharply once AI stocks come out.