Marketers Must Rethink AI Hype and Habits After Benedict Evans’ Reality Check
Benedict Evans, the technology analyst known for calling platform shifts early, brought welcomed precision to an overheated AI debate in The Knowledge Project Podcast. He argues the impact is historic, but not mystical. “This is like the biggest thing since the iPhone,” he said, “but I also think it’s only the biggest thing since the iPhone.” For communicators, that framing matters. Treat AI as a platform shift that will reshape tools and channels, not as a force that replaces strategy, audience understanding, or brand stewardship. The mandate is to build practical road maps for a fragmented, experimental landscape and resist the lure of science-fiction promises.
Adoption is slower and patchier than headlines suggest
Evans points to consistent survey patterns: “It’s like something around 10% of people are using this every day, another sort of 15 to 20% every week.” Many try it, do not get it, or return only weekly. That mirrors what many marketing teams see in pilots that never leave the lab. He pins part of the problem on product design. The blank chatbot interface forces people to invent use cases from scratch, which slows habits. The practical path for communications is to embed AI where work already happens. If a CRM button says “Draft reply” or a newsroom tool pre-fills a headline variant, usage jumps because the job to be done is obvious. Communicators should fund integrations, not sightseeing experiments, and measure adoption on daily active use inside workflows rather than demo traffic.
