Why we built this global AI adoption survey — and why it matters right now.
Most people think they’re using AI. Most people are wrong.
We spend a lot of time in the communities where this is actually happening — on X, YouTube, Discord servers, offline events, and forums where developers, founders, and operators are pushing AI further every week. And the gap between what those people are doing and what the average professional thinks “using AI” means is bigger than most people realize.
Here’s what we keep seeing: someone says they use AI at work. What they mean is they open ChatGPT a few times a week to search for something, rewrite an email, or summarize a document. That’s not wrong. But it’s the first step on a long staircase — and most people don’t know the staircase exists.
In February 2020, a virus was spreading overseas. The stock market was doing great. Your kids were in school. You were going to restaurants and shaking hands. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper, you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet.
Then, over three weeks, the entire world changed.
Matt Shumer — with six years building in the AI space — published a thread in February 2026 that was seen 86 million times in 48 hours. His opening argument: we’re now in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much bigger than Covid. He’s not alone. The conversation happening in the communities where AI is actually being built sounds nothing like what most professionals hear in their industries.
The people raising the alarm aren’t predicting. They’re reporting what already happened to their own jobs.
“I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.”
There’s an organization called METR that actually measures this with data. They track how long an AI can work independently on real tasks without human help. About a year ago, the answer was roughly ten minutes. Then an hour. Then several hours. Their most recent measurement showed AI completing tasks that take a human expert nearly five hours — and that number is doubling approximately every seven months.
Those measurements don’t yet include the latest models released in early 2026.
The free tier problem compounds this. Most people are using the free version of AI tools, which is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI by the free-tier tools is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools and using them daily for real work are experiencing a completely different technology.
The same tools being used to answer basic questions can also write and deploy code, automate entire workflows, analyze months of business data, generate production-ready designs, build internal tools, and run tasks autonomously while you do something else entirely.
People who’ve figured this out aren’t working harder. They’re just not waiting.
We’re not in a “this will be important someday” moment. The people who are ahead in their industries right now are the ones who started experimenting seriously six months ago. The bar is still low enough that six months of honest effort puts you ahead of 90% of your field.
This is a free, global, open self-assessment. No tricks, no sales pitch.
We built it because we believe the first step to changing your situation is understanding it honestly. You’ll answer questions about how you actually use AI in your specific role — not how you plan to, not how you think you should, but how you do right now. The questions get specific. Some of them will surprise you. Some of them will describe things you didn’t know were possible.
At the end, you’ll see your level across five stages, from Explorer to Catalyst. You’ll get an honest description of where you are and one concrete next step.
If you want to see how your results compare to other professionals — by country, industry, company type, and salary range — you can share your email and a few anonymous demographic details. This is completely optional.
Your individual answers are never shared with anyone. The benchmark is built from aggregate, anonymous data. The more people participate, the more useful the comparison becomes.
If you’d rather just see your own result and leave, that’s completely fine too.
We’re building a library of resources around this: tools to try, communities to join, people to follow, free and paid learning paths, events, and news filtered for what actually matters. None of it is behind a paywall.
If you want any of that — tips, resources, community updates — you can opt in when you finish the quiz. Or not. No pressure either way.
We’re not researchers. We’re practitioners. We run an agency, we teach, we build, and we’re deep in communities where this conversation is already happening at a high level.
We built this because we kept having the same conversation: someone talented, experienced, and capable who simply hadn’t been exposed to what’s now possible. That’s a fixable problem. This is one small attempt to fix it.
If this resonates with you, share it with someone who should be thinking about this. Most people won’t hear it until it’s too late. You can be the reason someone you care about gets a head start.
— Orlando Osorio & Alberto Sadde