How People Are Using AI Right Now
Most of us have only dipped a toe in the water.
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Friends,
Everyone at that table had built something. I had been invited.
There were fifteen of us, and I knew none of them. A friend had brought me along to one of those dinners where the conversation is the point and the food is an afterthought, and I spent the first hour doing the arithmetic you do when you walk into a room like that. The man across from me had started a company, sold it, started another, sold that one too - and again and again. The woman beside him ran a fund and was retired. Two seats down was someone who had built a charity from nothing, the way other people build a shed, because they had the means and the will and it seemed like the thing to do. By every measure that counted in that room, I was the smallest person there.
I said little. Listening is what you do when you are the only name nobody recognises, and listening is how I make my living anyway.
The conversation found its way to AI, the way every conversation does now. And one of them confessed to me that he had waited far too long to take this seriously and was finally doing it, going all the way in for his team. Then his face changed. The thing that worried him, he said, was not the technology. It was that not everyone would be ready to join the race at the same time, and he did not know what would happen to the ones who could not. The conversation moved on to something brighter. I was the only person in that room whose whole working life is the thing he had just described, and I said nothing.
You do not need a dinner like that to meet the people he meant. In your daily life you have already heard one of them, and perhaps you have been one. A video arrives on WhatsApp: a cat playing a piano, a city that does not exist, a politician saying something he never said. Someone forwards it with three laughing emojis, someone else replies “Lol, it’s AI”, and that is the end of it. The phrase has become a way of putting the thing back in its box and closing the lid. It’s not real, not my concern, on to the next thing. But watch what is happening in that exchange. The person forwarding the video would tell you that they do not use AI, that they would not know where to start, that it is for younger or more technical people. And yet they handle its output a dozen times a day, passing it on, helping to decide what their friends and family take to be real. They are waist-deep in the water, and they would swear to you they are standing on dry land.
The reverse happens too, and it is stranger. Something real arrives, something so extraordinary that the instinct now is to assume it cannot be true. A real photograph, an actual event, a real human achievement, something incredulous that you couldn’t believe a human would say, and the first response is suspicion, that it is probably fake, probably made by a machine. We have reached the point where reality itself has to prove it is not a forgery!
That blur, the difficulty of telling the fake from the real, is the centre of all this rather than a side effect of it. The skill the next ten years will ask for is not the ability to make a video or write a clever prompt. It is the much older human ability to judge, to weigh, to know what you are looking at. And you cannot build that standing on the bank, insisting you are not wet. Even if you have decided, very reasonably, that none of this has anything to do with you, it already does. It is in your group chats, your news feed, and the email a colleague sent that reads just a little too smoothly. The only choice left is whether you understand the water you are already in.
Most of what we are told about how people use AI describes those who have taken to it. The people who have not are harder to count, and so they go uncounted.
There is a study that comes out every year now, same author, same method, three editions of it from HBR, and it has become the thing people forward to each other to explain what is going on. It is called, more or less, how people are really using AI.
The first edition, a year after ChatGPT arrived, read like an instruction manual. People used AI to generate ideas, fix code, draft emails, complain to companies. The categories were technical and practical, the language of a tool you pick up for a task and put down again. And almost nobody was doing it. Even among the world’s knowledge workers, only about one in ten used it with any regularity.
The second edition showed the change. The most common use was no longer technical. It was therapy and companionship, with organising a life and finding purpose close behind. People had stopped asking the machine to write code. They were asking it to help them live.
The third edition, this week’s, widened until it covered almost everything. Therapy stayed at the top, but troubleshooting climbed from nowhere, fun and nonsense rose, and fan fiction, autonomous agents and tarot readings all arrived from outside the rankings. The worry running through it was that we are handing over, without noticing, the one thing we were meant to keep doing ourselves, which is the thinking.
The honest line in the report is the one I think people skip. These are not clean breaks. They are shifts in emphasis. The number of users keeps growing, so one use rising does not mean another has disappeared. Everything that was true three years ago is still true. There is just more of it, and more of us inside it.
And there is a hidden floor under all of it, which is not the study’s fault, because almost every study of this kind shares it. The data is built by reading what people post. The editions mined Reddit, Quora, and now LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube. But to be counted, you have to talk about your AI use in public, with enough fluency to be understood. That selects for the enthusiast, the early adopter, the person already in deep enough to have opinions worth sharing. It cannot see the person who opens the app, types a question the way they would type it into Google, takes the first answer, and closes the tab without telling a soul. That person leaves no trace. They are the dark matter of this whole subject, invisible and almost certainly the greater part of the mass.
The datasets that do not depend on people volunteering tell a different story. A study of more than a million real conversations with one of these tools found that practical guidance, looking something up, and writing made up around three quarters of everything, rather than building or amplifying anything. The company behind another of the tools, Anthropic, found, in its own usage data of Claude, that people who had been at it six months or more attempted harder work and succeeded far more often than newcomers. That is the most hopeful finding in any of this, because it means the gap is not talent. It is practice, and practice can be taught. Stanford reckons more than half the US population has now used these tools, which is to say, more than half of us (in the West, at least) have touched the water once.
So when a headline tells you how people are really using AI, hold the word really up to the light. What it means is how the people who talk about AI use AI. The rest, the ones that man at the dinner was worried about, do not appear in the data at all. We have built a confident portrait of a minority and hung it in the hall as if it were everyone.
There is a difference between a tool that answers you and a tool that multiplies you. Google mostly answered the question you brought it. You typed in what you wanted, it handed back links, and most of the work stayed yours. It was an option, not a collaborator. What sits on the desk at your fingertips now is a different kind of thing. Used well, it is an amplifier. It takes what you are already good at and makes you larger than you are alone, the way a microphone takes a voice that could fill a room and lets it fill a stadium. The person who understands this does not ask it to summarise an email. They hand it the messy, half-formed problem at the centre of their work, the one they would normally chew on for a week, and they think alongside it, and they come out having done something they could not have done by themselves.
Almost nobody does this. Most use is the small use, the answer fetching, the tidying of what was already there. People have an amplifier on the desk and use it as an option, working an instrument that could change the shape of their working life to do, a little faster, the things they could already do. That is the shallow end. It is a failure of imagination about what the tool is for, and nobody should be blamed for failing to imagine a thing they were never shown.
To see why the amplifier sits unused, look away from the datasets and toward a single desk. You will recognise the person sitting at it, because there is one in every organisation and possibly one in your own house.
They have done the same work for a long time: twenty years in editorial, say, the kind of craft the job title undersells. They are good at it, and being good at it is a large part of who they are, at work and at home and in their own head. They can feel, the way you feel weather coming, that the work is about to change into something they do not recognise, and they feel they will lose their identity in this weather.
So they do a careful, understandable thing. They keep the tool small. They let it summarise an email, because an email is not precious. They let it tidy a report. They never let it near the part of the job they are proud of, the part that is theirs, because to do that would be to find out whether a machine can do the very thing that makes them who they are. That is a question they are not ready to ask out loud.
You can read this as a fear of the technology. It is not. It is a fear of the answer. They are not standing at the edge because they cannot swim. They are standing at the edge because they have decided, in advance and without any evidence, that they will sink. The inability is imagined. The fear is entirely real. And the cruel turn is that the fear produces the exact thing it dreads, because while they keep the tool small, the colleague two desks over does not, and the gap between them widens by the week.
I know you have been in meetings this year where the decision has already been made, all the way to the top. One organisation told me, without a flicker of hedging, that they had chosen to examine every process they run and commit to it without reservation, having satisfied themselves it was safe. That is a serious sentence, and it commits thousands of people to a new way of working. And yet the same workforce is splintered, those already swimming lengths on one side and those who have not got their feet wet on the other, passing each other in the corridor each morning without quite seeing one another. Having learned that swimmers can no longer believe anyone is still frightened of the water, they do nothing to help because they cannot see that help is needed. The gap is no longer about access, since everyone has the tools now. It is about mindset, and mindset is the one thing you cannot buy and download. It has to be coached into a person, by another person, on purpose.
So what moves someone from the edge into the water? It is rarely the tool, because they already hold the same one as everyone else, and it is not a course on prompting, though those have their place. What moves a person is a single moment of seeing it done. One time, with their own eyes, on their own real problem, watching the thing they were afraid of turn out to hold their weight. A fear that took years to build can fall over in an afternoon, because it was only ever a belief, and beliefs collapse the moment reality contradicts them.
This is the whole of it. You get into the water with them. You take the real problem off their real desk, not a tidy example invented for the purpose, and you show them what the amplifier does to it, and you watch their face change the way the founder’s face changed at that dinner, except in the opposite direction. The willingness to be a beginner again, the rarest and most useful thing any adult can keep, comes back. And once a person has felt the water hold them once, they stop asking whether they can swim and start asking how far.
It was never a technology problem. The people who will matter most in the next ten years are not the ones who can build the cleverest system. They are the ones who can stand in the shallow end with someone who is frightened, and stay there, and not let go until the person notices they have been floating for a while.
I went into that dinner counting everyone else’s achievements and finding myself short. Fifteen people who had built things, and me, who had been invited. And every one of them, the founders, the fund manager, the man who built a charity the way you build a shed, had at some point stood exactly where the frightened editor stands now. None of them was born knowing how to build a company. Nobody is born swimming. Every one of them had, on some ordinary forgotten afternoon, got into water they were not sure would hold them, because someone or something had convinced them it would.
That is the only thing that has ever separated the people in the deep end from the people on the bank. It was never about talent, or even courage. It was a moment, and usually a person, that got them in.
So if you have been standing at the edge of this, telling yourself that this AI world is for other people, younger people, cleverer people, let me be the one at your table for a moment. You are already in the water. You have been for a while, every time you forwarded a video you could not quite believe. The only question left is whether you keep pretending you are dry, or whether you find out how far you can go.
Everyone at that table had built something. And every one of them had once begun by getting in.
My book, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, is published by Kogan Page on 3 July 2026. [less than a month] It is about the human capabilities that the water cannot take from you. You can pre-order it at superskillsbook.com or just buy it on Amazon.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
PS. If your organisation is thinking about AI and human capability, I keynote, coach and advise on this. I also do bulk book orders for teams.
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If you enjoyed this, forward it to someone who’d find it useful. And if you haven’t yet, pre-order SuperSkills at superskillsbook.com - out 3 July and get the pre-order bonuses.