84% of The World Has Never Used AI, Here's What That Means For You

All right, so Neil and I, we are live again. We're live again and there's a lot to talk about today. It's actually 9:42 PM for Neil. He's in India right now. He's been up since 2 AM. We were just talking. I just came back from a 1-day trip in Arizona yesterday. And so, there's a lot going on. Last week, Founder Retreat. Neil's been traveling for 2 weeks. So Neil, maybe we can just even talk about how are things going from a business and marketing standpoint right now? Because I was texting with one of my friends this morning. And we're just like, dude, every single day is crazy right now. It's not even every week, every single day is crazy. Okay, Block cuts 4,000, 40% of staff yesterday, right? You know, every single day there's a new AI launch or whatever. You know, people are talking about the death of marketers. It's over for paid media, right? These are all the things that we're going to talk about, why you must disrupt yourself now. Like Cursor, they went from, you know, fastest company or one of the fastest companies to get up to a billion in revenue. And now everyone's churning everywhere, not using Cursor anymore, right? And so the world's crazy right now. And yeah, maybe let's just do like a quick debrief real quick while people roll in.

Yeah, the world is definitely crazy, but I think it's been crazy for— or crazy, forget the word crazy. I think it's been difficult since mid-2022, which is when rates started going up. And there's been a lot of ups and downs. Some of the ups and downs is because of AI. Some of the ups and downs are because of interest rates. Some of the ups and downs are because of Random political policies like tariffs. Some of it is because of war, right? But I think it's been a really chaotic 3 years or 4 years actually where it's starting to go on, right? And what's happening now is I think we're all getting used to the craziness and it's becoming normal.

I think it's getting crazier. In some ways it's good, in some ways it's bad. Oh, that's a nice water bottle. So, some ways it's good, some ways it's bad. But I subscribe to the belief that we are at the top of the roller coaster ride right now. We're just about to get to the top of it and it's about to come down. And so, it's only going to get crazier. The world's going to accelerate even more. And I'm here for it. I think, I don't know about you. Actually, I do know about you. I'll speak for you here. I operate better in chaos. I think you do pretty well in chaos too. Yeah.

Chaos is good because Chaos gets rid of a lot of competition.

Yeah, a lot of people can't take it, right? They don't have the stomach for it. And so I think if there's one takeaway for you, like the chaos that we've been through in our careers, Neil's been in business, I want to say 24 years. I want to say, you know, I've been in business, call it 10, 11 years or so. And the more chaos you face, the more you get through, the more resilience you build and the better you turn out for business. Because I believe that the most— the stat is 90% of businesses fail within the first 5 years or so. The case for that is really just lack of resiliency. And there's a stat that I came across yesterday, Neil. For any big business, we're talking like the generational companies ever, really, it's by year 15 that they really start to take off. And that actually aligns well with Jensen Huang from Nvidia, right? It took till year 15 for them to really take off. And he said for the first 15 years, he was a pretty crappy CEO. And they've been around for a very long time. So I do think it takes quite quite a while to build something great. And even for, you know, NP Digital has been around for 8 years or so. You've been building your brand for a while and you've been in the marketing space for a while, right? You've been building for a bit, you've been building marketing software, right? And for me, it's been a little less than that, but I just, I think it's good to kind of share examples around this stuff.

Yeah, no, the key during these unknown times is You hunker down, you focus, and you focus on what really moves the needle for you. I think what happens during these times is entrepreneurs and marketers get distracted and they forget a lot of basic things like paid ads still work, SEO still works, GEO, whatever you want to end up calling it, AEO still works, right? Doing social media marketing, all these things still work. You just got to keep pushing through it. And the people who push hard and double down more when competitors are pulling away, especially during bad times, they're the ones who tend to gobble up more market share during the good times.

Quick break. One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90+ hours a month on content alone. ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work, not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice. It helps you with other areas. such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs. We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show. Let me tell you something. I was sitting in a conference room yesterday, Neil, and so 2 people were executives at this company. Okay, let's just say they're VP level. Okay, this company, let's just say they have 2,000 employees, something like that. And another one was a consultant. So you had a consultant come in the room. He just kind of flew in from, let's say, Florida. Okay. One of our friends and, you know, my CTO was in the room. Now, all the things, all the problems we were talking about, okay, when we— when you kind of dissect it, it really came down to the people that were doing well in whatever companies or, you know, for example, the consultant was working with or like the problems these 2 VPs had or the problems that, you know, we had as an organization. Right. It really comes down to one thing. And, um, you know, I, I'll give Syed credit for this term, but, um, we actually— you and I had already talked about this a few weeks prior where we say that money amplifies your nature and AI amplifies your intelligence. Um, Syed had it even cleaner. He says AI is actually IA. Do you want to know what IA is?

No. Okay, I do want to know, but I don't know what it is.

Yeah, yeah. So, so IA is intelligence amplifier, right? And I'm like, oh, well, if you're a dummy, it's also a dummy amplifier too, right? And so, so, so my point of saying this is that I think anybody that we work with in our organizations right now that are really AI-enabled, it's really intelligence amplifier. And I could see that the 2 executives that I was talking to, the things that they were complaining about had to do with people, but more so it had to do with people that weren't enabled by this stuff, right? And then you and I have been talking about this for a while, but I just want to call that out. And I'm not calling those people dummies necessarily. I'm just saying that the gap, all the complaints I'm hearing, this room is kind of a microcosm of that, right? The complaints that I'm hearing It's just that the gap is getting wider and wider. And the crazy thing is, as I kind of walked the floor in that office, I was just like, dude, a lot of these people— and I was messaging one of the co-founders later, I was like, he's asking me, how was the culture, right? I was like, dude, the culture is amazing. Like, whenever sales goes up, like, people start clapping and stuff, right? I'm like, that's amazing. People are in office 5 days a week. I'm like, that's cool, right? But it is very apparent that the vast majority of people are kind of unaware of this stuff. And I put up a a chart on my Instagram about a week ago or so, and I took it from X, and I don't know if you saw it on my Instagram. Did you see it? The 84% of people are not using AI in the world right now. Here, check this out over here. So I'm sharing my screen, and Neil, you can tell— you can say what you see on the screen over here.

Do you see this? It's really tiny. It says each dot is 3.2 million people. The text on the right is too hard for me to read.

Okay, here, I'll make it Oh, when I make it bigger, it makes it smaller. Okay, so what I have on the screen right here is this is a chart, and some of you might have seen this already, but the whole idea with this chart is you have, I think there's 2,500 dots on this screen. Each dot represents 8— it represents 3.2 million people. So you have a total of 8.1 billion humans. Are you following so far?

Yeah.

Okay, so you can see the vast majority of these dots, 84%, are people who have never used AI. So you have 6.8 billion people, that's 84%. Now, you have a bunch of green dots on the screen, about 16% or so, 1.3 billion are free chatbot users. So like the free version of ChatGPT as an example. Then you have the yellow dots, which is about 15 to 25 million, which is 0.3% of the world. These are the people who pay $20 a month for AI. Okay, then you have the red dot over here, which is using coding scaffold like Claude Code, for example, or Codex, right? That's 0.04%. That's 2 to 5 million people in the world. Now, here's the thing with this chart. I think it's like, okay, on one end you can be like, okay, yeah, we're in the very early innings of AI. On my end, the way I look at that, Neil, is like, that's a very complacent way to look at this. I look at this as, even if I'm not competing with the top 0.04% over here, the $2 to $5 million, it's better for me to just look at the fact that maybe I am competing with them, right? 'Cause that's going to push me. 'Cause the fact of the matter is this is all moving so quickly right now. So I'd rather not like, sure, we are very early right now, But I'd rather take the other angle where I like, I want to cover my butt.

So, adult population uses AI. Let's see.

Neil's verifying the data here. Yeah.

So, um, this is from 2020, uh, this is from 2025. So I bet you it's a little bit higher right now. Uh, if you just look at the US and the reason I want to end up saying the US, because I'm not saying that data's inaccurate. It's just more so, I bet you it varies a lot country by country. So if you look at the US adult population, and this was in 2025, roughly 60% of the US population uses AI. I think that number—

Where's that sourced from?

Google AI overviews.

Oh, okay. Well, what did this, what did it source from?

Let me go back into my history and Do the Google search again. All right, so it's pulling from Pew Research Center.

Okay, yeah.

And then YouGov and then Associated Press News. I don't know where the AP pulled from, but the main source is the Pew Research Center. So yeah, people are using AI when they look at daily usage. I believe I saw somewhere in here 27%.

Yeah. By the way, Neil, you know how many, what percent of the world is American? That's like 4%. And so I would say because we don't Totally. I'm just looking at the—

exactly, countries with high GDP. And then by the way, when I pulled it up the second time, because I went through history, the first time it was 55 to 60%. I used 60%, right? This time on the screen, the AI overview says 35 to 62%. So that's not too helpful.

That's such a wide range, right? But I think Neil's calling out a very fair thing. And so The way you want to look at this too is like you should probably segment by GDP in this situation, because I will say, and probably same thing for you guys, Neil, whenever I talk to someone during an interview, they do use at the very least ChatGPT or Claude. Most of the responses you get are ChatGPT. So they're already in that high percentage, right? The 16% or something like that. I will also say though, so like, as an example, for my company at Single Grain, we are putting people into the red, like we're forcing them to use coding scaffolds. But even in that case, some people use it in very basic ways, right? So they're not using it the most advanced way. So you even have to segment it further. That's why I'm saying that it's nice to look at when you blend all the metrics together, but that's going to make you complacent. You have to think about like, how is your nation and also like what industry are you in and who you're competing with? Because the way I see it, Neil, I think we're competing with the top, you know, 3%, if not the top 0.04%.

Yes, I agree with that. And what's funny is, is I'm at an event here in India, Someone asked me earlier today, no joke, hey, we work at a large corporation, we're trying to do training, we're trying to get these people onboarded and get them to use AI, and we're getting a lot of education. Some people are just struggling and don't want to adapt. What should I do? And I'm like, replace. I'm not trying to be cutthroat, but if they don't want to adapt and you're giving them the education and the tools, you're paying for it. I asked them, are you expecting them to learn it on their own time or company time? They're like, no, during company time. And I'm like, well, if you're trying to train them and teach them, you know, go through HR, write them up, give them a warning. And if they don't adapt and they don't want to listen, then go through the termination process, whatever the legal route is, depending on the country you're in.

You know what's crazy to me, Neil? It's so we, um, we do, we've kind of talked about this, but we do the hackathons. Okay. So we do the hackathons. Those are mandatory. And we say, okay, no client work, no sales calls, nothing like those hackathon days are sacred. Um, we have weekly office hours and then we do show and tells and all that. And then there's even a Claude Code, uh, help desk, right? where people can ask questions and things like that. So, I believe, and you can actually push back on this if you want, Neil, because we will disagree when we feel something. I'm like, on our end, I believe that we're doing what we can as a company to bring people to the water, but you can't make the horse drink, right? And so, even if we've provided all this scaffolding, all this training, if someone is still saying, well, I want someone to teach me how to do this and I want someone to follow, where I'm just like, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, inertia is very real. I think this is just human nature. People naturally don't want to change, right? And that's why most people are most people. And I truly believe that, like, I was talking to one— by the way, dude, I got to tell you about the Beat Claude challenge. I read the first person I talked to. Oh my God, killer, killer. Like, I'm just like, what is going on here, right? And I'm happy to explain the challenge again and go through that. But I'm just telling you, like, let me just ask you, Neil, like, I think you guys are trying to do what you can to train and bring AI transformation, AI fluency, and all that.

Yeah.

But if I come to you, like you've given me the resource and I say, hey, I still want to go to— I still want someone to teach me, like what's your response going to be to me?

It depends what role they're in, right? And what we're requesting them to use AI for. If we're giving them the education, and usually when we give the education, it's not just go watch this video or tutorial or try this, we will give them We'll pair them up with other people in the organization who are doing cool things, and they'll start showing them and teaching them. But more so, we don't run into the problem of them saying, I still want you to teach me. We run into the problem, and I think other organizations sometimes run into this problem, in which people just don't adapt, even if you give them all the lessons and stuff, and they don't care and they don't want to adapt.

It's not a big percentage.

It's a very small percentage, but we do see some people who just They don't care and they don't believe in it and they don't like it and they're set in their ways.

You know what I think is important, Neil? You want to hire people. And the way I look at this too is the entrepreneurs I get along best with, they always have a beginner's mindset, meaning that they know that they don't know. The older you get, the more you realize that, oh, I really don't know that much and I'm really just trying to learn the whole time. I think it's the people who think they've made it, the people who think that they no longer need to learn, Like, for example, if you did really well in school and you think you're just done after school, that doesn't compound. You've kind of stopped that compounding, right? And so, and to Neil's point too, like, you can't just send people a YouTube video and say, hey, go learn it, or go read this X thread and go learn it. It's more so, at least for us, I'll just share the example, is when we do these hackathons, we are putting people into pods and we're building real solutions. They're learning how to build real solutions and they're sharing these things. And I'm in there asking pointed questions when the show and tell happens. And so, you want to bring people along for the ride. You want people to contribute. But one of my friends, actually one of our mutual friends, he just started asking his direct reports every week, like, what have you automated this week? What have you automated this week? Right? And it's a very scary question to keep getting that from your boss all the time, but it does start to drive people. So we can leave at that. But do you want to hear about the Beat Claude thing and how the results were on the very first one?

Yeah.

Okay. All right. So the Beat Claude challenge, if you go to singlegrain.com/apply, if you're interested in a job, We basically say, hey, if you want to work at Single Grain, you have to beat AI. And you can use AI all you want in this challenge. We encourage you to use AI. So use Claude, use ChatGPT, use whatever you want. And the key thing is we're going to score you against this. And there's a scoring rubric that it uses. And so we'll score the individual and we'll score the AI. If the individual can't beat the AI out the gate, they're out, right? And so the first person that I talked to scored like a 90, 6 or something. I'm like, that's too high. I'm like, for sure he's not that good, right? So I end up talking to the guy. He's very, you know, kind of a shy person, you know, very soft-spoken and all that. And I talked to him more and more. And then eventually he starts telling me about how he started his business, how he hired a bunch of people before, and how like, unfortunately the business didn't work out. Business is tough, right? And then he started showing me his workflows. I'm like, what's the most impressive thing you built? He starts showing me all these workflows. We start going back and forth on this. And then I'm like, This is good. And for— because the third, like, what I'm looking for, Neil, is when I want to hire an exceptional person, I want to have an exceptional conversation with them. That entire conversation was exceptional, right? Um, and, you know, I then I was like, okay, he spoke to the CTO after. He's actually meeting again with the CTO today to do like a, like, build it, build in, in real time, right? And you can't do this for every role, I believe, but for AI-enabled one, like AI automation engineer, that's what we're looking for. One of our mutual friends, He has 6 AI automation engineers right now. You know what's happening? Um, they are running circles around a product team and the product team is actually blocking them. Like, the product team hates this team, right? Um, and like, it took— like, the product team didn't want to give these people like API keys for like 2 months or so. Imagine that happening in your organization.

I'll be pissed.

Yeah, you would be pissed, right, as a CEO. But that's— there's a lot of politicking going on, um, in like a larger organization, right, around, around your size, I would say. Um, but my point is, I think People are like, I see people talking about, oh, we're not going to hire anybody below a staff or principal engineer now. But I actually think hiring these kids out of college, dude, they're working for $20 to $25 an hour or so, and they're working 100-hour weeks, and they're getting celebrated. And that's scaring a lot of people in the company. But dude, some of these are sleeping in the office, like not showering.

Right?

So anyway.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

But no, you know, it's— people will adapt. We'll see what happens with marketing.

Guys, thank you for joining us and we will see you. We'll see you next time.