Most People Haven’t Started Yet
Look at all that grey.
Each dot on that chart represents about 3.2 million people. The grey dots are people who have never used AI. That is 6.8 billion people. 84% of the world.
The green dots at the bottom are the 1.3 billion who have tried a free chatbot. The yellow sliver is roughly 15 to 25 million who pay $20 a month for AI tools. And the tiny red dot at the very end? That is the 2 to 5 million people who use coding tools like the ones that dominate the AI conversation right now.
The entire debate about AI replacing jobs, AI changing industries, AI rewriting the future of work is happening inside that red dot. Meanwhile, 84% of the world has not even opened one of these tools.
The speed of technology development and the speed of adoption are deeply mismatched. AI is not nearly as far along as we assume it is. Not because the technology is behind, but because most people have not been invited in yet.
A Tale of Two (AI) Worlds
There are two worlds right now when it comes to AI.
In one world, people inside the AI atmosphere try a new tool every week. They debate model benchmarks. They automate chunks of their workflow before breakfast. They write long posts about how everything is about to change.
In the other world, most people have maybe tried ChatGPT once or twice, used it to generate a grocery list, thought it was fine, then gone back to doing things the way they always have. The gap between these two worlds is enormous. And it's growing.
The conversation in tech treats this as a knowledge problem. If people just understood how powerful AI is, they would adopt it. We disagree. It is not a knowledge problem. It is an access problem. The tools are still too complicated, too technical, and too intimidating for most people to use in a meaningful way.
We’ve Seen This Before
Think about photography before smartphones. Or the internet before the world wide web. If you wanted to share photos in 2005, you needed a camera, a computer, editing software, and a place to upload them. Most people did not bother. Not because they lacked creativity. Because the process had too many steps.
Then mass adoption of the internet, smartphones, and Instagram showed up and removed every barrier. Take a photo. Share it. Done. Suddenly hundreds of millions of people were creating and sharing visual content every day. Not because the camera got better. Because someone made the door wide enough for everyone to walk through.
AI is at that same moment right now. The technology is there. The simplicity is not. Most AI tools still assume you know what a prompt is, that you understand model selection, that you can troubleshoot when something breaks. That works for the red squares. It does not work for the grey.
What Happens When the Door Opens
We see this every day at YouWare.
A community mental health worker in the US saw a flyer for a local roofing company and offered to build them a website. She had never created anything on the internet before. A 70 year old public affairs trainer in northern England built a weather dashboard so her neighbors could check forecasts and emergency alerts. A physiotherapist in Brazil made a patient management tool for his clinic. A lawyer built a local lifestyle guide. A retired IT worker created an avatar generator and started charging for it.
None of them are professional developers. Most had never written a line of code.
700,000 people use YouWare every month. Over 2 million projects have been created on the platform. We have never run an ad. Every single user found us because someone else shared what they built. That growth did not come from the red dot. It came from the grey.
The Story That Isn’t Being Told
The dominant story about AI right now is about loss. Jobs lost. Industries disrupted. Humans and their skills being made obsolete. That story is not wrong. Change is real and it is coming fast.
But there is another story that is just as real and barely gets told.
A coach who builds a booking system without hiring a developer. A retiree who turns a hobby into a side business. A teacher who creates interactive learning tools for her students.
These are not hypothetical examples. These are people on our platform right now. People who could not have built these things two years ago. Not because they lacked the idea. Because the tools did not exist for them.
The question everyone keeps asking is: what will AI take away? We think the better question is: what can it give to the people who have been left out of the conversation entirely?
Built for the 84%
We are not building for the people who are already inside the AI world. They have plenty of tools. We are building for everyone else.
For the person who has a great idea but has never written a line of code. For the small business owner who needs a website but cannot afford a developer. For the creator who wants to build something and share it with the world but does not know where to start.
Most people have not started yet. That is not a failure. This is a formal invitation.
