The last two years have been a whirlwind. We’ve moved past the “Early Adopters” and into the “Early Majority” phase of AI. But the adoption is wildly uneven.

At work, we talk about the AI Adoption Chasm. It’s the gap between building an “AI-assisted” experience versus an “AI-Native” one.

The difference?

• AI-Assisted: building a basic GenAI chatbot or “sprinkling” LLM intelligence on a legacy process.
• AI-Native: Rethinking the process so fundamentally that it wouldn’t exist without an AI model.

I’ve been thinking about how to best explain this gap, which I believe is all about mental model and breaking old habits, and I keep coming back to a “growing wings” analogy:

Imagine we all grew wings overnight. Because we’ve spent our whole lives walking, our instinct would be to keep our feet on the ground. We’d only fly if we hit a dead end or a massive wall.

That’s exactly how many organizations treat AI. They use it as a “tweak” to existing non-AI processes.

But “AI-Native” means something different. It means overcoming the fear of the unfamiliar. It means realizing that the “old way” is often the “slow way.” When we finally cross that mental chasm, we start to fly by default.

It’s okay to be cautious—flying is new to us. But once you realize you have wings, does it really make sense to walk everywhere?