AI Guides › Trend Watch
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
"Everyone is using it" is one of the most persuasive and least checked claims in this industry. It gets propped up by sign-up figures, trending charts and the sense that your feed talks about nothing else. Those are signals of attention. Adoption is something else — people coming back to a tool, relying on it, paying for it, building it into how work actually gets done — and it's much quieter, which is exactly why it's easy to mistake one for the other.
The rule: hype is measured in attention and sign-ups; adoption is measured in repeated, unprompted use that survives the novelty wearing off — whenever someone cites a number, ask which of the two it actually counts.
| Attention (hype) signals | Adoption signals |
|---|---|
| Sign-ups, downloads, waitlist size | People returning over weeks and months |
| Mentions, trending topics, view counts | People naming specific tasks they now do differently |
| Launch-week traffic | Renewals and continued payment |
| Funding and valuation news | Integration into existing processes and systems |
| "Tried by millions" | Teams that would object if it were taken away |
Any claim can be placed in one column or the other. Most headline figures land in the left-hand one.
You can't audit an industry, but you can look carefully at the evidence you do have.
Where a figure doesn't say, treat it as an attention number until shown otherwise.
Skip treating a trending chart as a buying signal. Skip dismissing a tool because it's hyped — attention and adoption can coexist, and hype simply doesn't prove the second. And skip adopting something because "everyone is"; your decision is about your tasks, not the crowd's.