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

0:00Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com. 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 p.m.

0:37Eric Siu:for Neil. He's in India right now. He's been up since 2 a.m. We're just talking. I just came back from a one-day trip in Arizona yesterday. And so there's a lot going on. Last week, Founder Retreat, Neil's been traveling for two 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.

1:08Eric Siu: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.

1:29Neil Patel: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 three years or four 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.

2:13Eric Siu:I think it's getting crazier. In some ways, it's good. In some ways, it's better. 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.

2:45Neil Patel:Chaos is good because chaos gets rid of a lot of competition.

2:51Eric Siu:Yeah, a lot of people can't take it, right? They don't have a 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 five years or so. The case for that is really just lack of resiliency. And there's a stat that I came across yesterday, Neil.

3:21Eric Siu: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 to 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 a while to build something great. And even for, you know, MP Digital has been around for eight 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.

3:52Eric Siu: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.

4:00Neil Patel: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? you know 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

4:45Eric Siu:good times let me tell you something i was sitting in a conference room yesterday neil and um so two people were executives at this company okay let's just say they're vp level okay this company let's to say they have 2 ,000 employees, something like that. And another one was a consultant. So he had a consultant come in the room. He just kind of flew in from, let's say, Florida, okay, one of our, you know, friends. And, you know, my CTO was in the room. Now, all the things, all the problems we're talking about, okay, 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 two VPs had or the problems that, that, you know, we had as an organization, right?

5:28Eric Siu:Um, it really comes down to one thing and, um, you know, I I'll, 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. You want to know what IA is?

5:45Neil Patel:No.

5:46Eric Siu:Okay. I do want to know, but I don't know what it is. Yeah, yeah. 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 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 two 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. And you and I have been talking about this for a while.

6:18Eric Siu: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, the culture is amazing. Like whenever our sales goes out, like people start clapping and stuff, right?

6:45Eric Siu:I'm like, that's amazing. People are in office five 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 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 say what you see on the screen over here. Do you see this?

7:14Neil Patel: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.

7:25Eric Siu: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 3.2 million people. So you have a total of 8.1 billion humans. Are you following so far?

7:40Neil Patel:Yeah.

7:41Eric Siu: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 bucks a month for AI, okay? Then you have the red dot over here, which is using coding scaffold, like Cloud Code, for example, or Codex, right? That's 0.04%. That's 2 to 5 million people in the world.

8:17Eric Siu: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 what the way I look at that Neil is like that's a very complacent way to look at this I look at this as you know even if I'm not competing with the top you know 0.04 percent over here to two to five million it's better for me to just look at the fact that maybe I am competing with them right because that's going to push me because 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

8:47Neil Patel:rather take the other angle where I'm like I want to cover my butt so adult population uses

8:56Eric Siu:AI. Let's see. Neil's verifying the data here.

9:00Neil Patel:Yeah, so this is from 2025, so I bet you it's a little bit higher right now. 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 is 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.

9:28Eric Siu:I think that number... Where's that sourced from? Google AI overviews. Oh, okay. Well, what did it sourced from?

9:36Neil Patel:Let me go back into my history and do the Google search again.

9:41Eric Siu:All right. So it's pulling from Pew Research Center. Okay, yeah.

9:46Neil Patel: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.

10:05Eric Siu: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're the richest nation.

10:14Neil Patel: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 use 60%, right? This time on the screen, the AI overview says 35 % to 62%. So not too helpful. That's such a wide range, right?

10:34Eric Siu:That's such a wide range. Neil's calling out a very fair thing. And so the way you want to look at this too is 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 chat GPT or Claude. Most of the responses you get are chat GPT. so they're already in that that high percentage right the 16 or something like that um i will also say though so like as an example for my company at single grain we are putting people into the 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 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 three percent if not the top 0.04

11:29Neil Patel:yes i agree with that um and what's funny is is i'm at an event here in india someone asked me earlier today no joke hey we're at large corporation we're trying to do training we're trying to get these people on boarded 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, man? 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 ask them, are you expecting them to learn it on their own time or company time? They're like, no, during company time.

12:06Neil Patel:And I'm like, well, if you're trying to train them and teach them, 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.

12:19Eric Siu:You know what's crazy to me, Neil? So 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. We have a weekly office hours, and then we do show and tells and all that. And then there's even a cloud code 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 you know I want someone to follow where I'm just like you know what I mean like it's at the end of the day inertia is very real I think this is just human nature um people naturally don't want to change right and that's why um most people are most people and I I truly believe that like Like I was talking to one, by the way, dude, I got to tell you about the beat cloud challenge.

13:18Eric Siu: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. But if I come to you, like you've given me the resource and I say, hey, I still want to, you know, go to, um, I still want someone to teach me, like, what's your response going to be to me?

13:42Neil Patel: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.

14:26Neil Patel: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

14:33Eric Siu: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 are, 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.

15:06Eric Siu:You've kind of stopped that compounding, right? And to Neil's point too, Like you can't just send people a YouTube video and say, hey, go learn. Go read this extra 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.

15:37Eric Siu: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, you know, it does start to drive people. So we can leave at that. But do you want to hear about the Beat Claw thing and how the results were on the very first one? Okay. All right. So the Beat Claw challenge, if you go to singlegrain.com slash 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.