Speaking recently on the Knowledge Project podcast, technology analyst and venture investor Benedict Evans said that AI was “the biggest thing since the iPhone, but only the biggest thing since the iPhone.” While the iPhone represented a major shift in focus from desktop computing to mobile, and spawned an array of new businesses from Instagram to Uber, it did not reshape the world to the extent that electricity or the Industrial Revolution did. In an effort to gauge AI’s impact, Evans recently polled the 170,000 readers of his weekly newsletter. With a tech-savvy and market-focused following, Evans’ readers represent an early adopter market. As Evans has previously noted, using a tool only once a week or a few times a month suggests the tool may not be that impactful. Where AI chatbot Daily Active Users (DAUs) represent 10% to 15% of total users, 79% of Evans’ readers use the technology daily. Most notably, nearly 48% of Evans’s readers say AI enables them to perform work that they could not have done on their own.
Source: Benedict Evans, September 2025