This is not the divide you've been warned about
Every generation has its defining inequality. For decades, we've debated the gap between rich and poor, between the highly educated and the less educated, between those with access to opportunity and those without. These divides are real, and they matter. But a new one is forming — and unlike those that came before it, this one comes with an unusual characteristic: it is entirely possible to choose which side of it you're on.
It is the divide between people who use AI as a daily personal amplifier — in their work, in their decisions, in their lives — and people who don't.
What makes this divide different from every previous technological gap is not its size. It's its speed. And it's the fact that, unlike the digital divide of the 1990s or the smartphone divide of the 2000s, this one doesn't announce itself. It accumulates quietly, compounding week by week. But here's what makes it fundamentally different from the divides of the past: the tools are free, accessible, and available to everyone right now. This is not a gap driven by privilege or circumstance. It is a gap driven by awareness and intention — and that means it can be closed by anyone willing to act.
I see this divide opening up every day — in my own work, in the organizations around me, and in the broader commercial and social world we all inhabit. And I've become convinced that the conversation we need to be having is not one of alarm, but of opportunity.
The speed that changes everything
Before we talk about what's at stake, we need to understand why this divide is forming so much faster than anything we've seen before — because the speed is not incidental. It is the entire point.
When personal computers arrived, the pace of change gave people time to adapt at their own rhythm. By the early 1990s — over a decade after the first mass-market machines appeared — only about 25% of U.S. households owned a personal computer. The wave was real, but it was slow enough that you could choose when to get on it. Someone approaching retirement in the 1980s could reasonably conclude that this technology wasn't relevant to the remaining years of their career. That was a defensible position.
Today, that position no longer holds — but the flip side is just as significant. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that less than two years after the public introduction of generative AI tools, nearly 40% of the U.S. working population was already using them to some degree. The personal computer took three years to reach just 20% adoption. The pace of AI adoption is unprecedented — and that same pace means that the opportunity to get ahead of this curve is also greater than ever before.
And here is what makes this moment truly unique: the tools are already in everyone's hands. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity — freely available to anyone with an internet connection, requiring no corporate rollout, no IT department, no budget approval. The barrier to entry has never been lower. The divide is no longer about access. It is about choice. And that is actually good news — because choices can be made today.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (2025); US Census Bureau / Statista — Historical PC adoption data
What the divide looks like from the inside — the employee
Let me make this concrete, because the divide doesn't live in statistics. It lives in offices, in teams, in the daily reality of people doing the same job in fundamentally different ways — and the contrast is already striking.
When I look at any organization today, I see three distinct groups forming.
The first group — roughly three to four out of every ten employees — are the digital adepts. They seek out AI tools proactively. They experiment, they build, they integrate. In my own work, this is the world I inhabit. I use AI to build custom agents that take over entire workflows, to run deep analyses that would otherwise cost days, to produce and maintain presentations in a fraction of the time. My baseline for what's achievable has permanently shifted — and the energy and confidence that comes with that shift is something I want everyone around me to experience.
The second group — another three to four — are the ready but unguided. They feel the urgency. They sense that something important is happening. But they lack the handholds: the training, the coaching, the concrete use cases that would allow them to make the leap. These people represent the single greatest opportunity available to any organization right now. With the right investment, they will cross the divide — and they will do so quickly.
And then there is the third group. Two to four people in every team of ten who haven't yet started moving. Their work is solid. But it meets yesterday's expectations, not tomorrow's. For them, the most important thing an organization can do is create the conditions — the safety, the support, the encouragement — that make starting feel possible rather than overwhelming.
Here is the productive tension this creates — and it runs in two directions at once.
For the employee who hasn't yet embraced AI: the opportunity is enormous and immediate. A landmark study by Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group, involving 758 knowledge workers, found that consultants using AI completed tasks 25.1% more quickly and produced results more than 40% higher in quality compared to those without AI access. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a transformation in what one person can deliver in a working day — and it translates directly into professional impact, visibility, and career momentum.
For the employer: the opportunity is equally significant. The organizations that close this internal divide fastest will pull ahead — in productivity, in talent retention, and in their ability to attract people who want to work somewhere that takes their professional development seriously.
Source: Dell'Acqua et al., "Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier," Harvard Business School / BCG, 2023 (758 knowledge workers)
Is it resistance, or is it an invitation?
When we see colleagues who haven't yet adopted AI, the tempting response is frustration. But I think the more useful response is curiosity — and generosity.
In a piece I published earlier — AI Transformation: Why Your People Are the Real Challenge — I argued that the primary obstacle to AI adoption in organizations has never been technology. It has always been people: how we lead them, support them, and create the conditions in which they can thrive. That argument feels more urgent today than when I first made it.
McKinsey's Superagency in the Workplace report, published in January 2025 and based on a survey of over 3,600 employees and 238 C-suite executives, reveals a striking pattern: while 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments in the next three years, only 1% report having reached AI maturity. More revealingly, 48% of employees rank training as the most important factor for AI adoption — yet nearly half report receiving minimal or no training at all. And when C-suite leaders were asked why their organizations are moving too slowly on AI, the number one reason cited was "talent skill gaps," not technology constraints.
That pattern tells us something important: in most organizations, the will to move is there on both sides — but the bridge between intention and action hasn't been built yet. That is the real problem to solve, and it is an eminently solvable one.
The organizations that will build the most durable competitive advantage are not those that simply deploy AI tools, but those that genuinely invest in helping every employee find their own way into this new way of working. That means real training built into the flow of work, not webinars nobody watches. It means coaching, experimentation time, and leaders who model the behavior they expect.
At the same time, the tools are free and the learning curve has never been gentler. There has never been a better moment for an individual to simply start — imperfectly, incrementally, but start.
The divide between those who use AI and those who don't is not just a divide between individuals. It is a divide between organizations that create that enabling culture and those that don't. And closing it is one of the highest-return investments any leadership team can make right now.
Source: McKinsey Digital , "Superagency in the Workplace," January 2025 (3,613 employees + 238 C-suite executives)
What the divide looks like from the inside — the consumer
The same dynamic that is reshaping the workplace is simultaneously reshaping the marketplace — and here the opportunity for individuals is just as profound.
Consider buying a car. An AI-empowered buyer can feed multiple quotes, full technical specifications, personal priorities, and budget constraints into an AI system and receive a rigorously reasoned recommendation — cross-referenced with independent reviews, real-world owner testimonials, and live market pricing — in under twenty minutes. They walk into the showroom already knowing which model fits their needs, what a fair price looks like, and which questions to ask. They make a better decision, faster, with more confidence.
The same empowerment applies to purchasing from international webshops, evaluating insurance products, comparing mortgages, assessing medical options, or negotiating a salary. In every context where information asymmetry has historically made decisions harder and outcomes worse, AI is fundamentally levelling the playing field — for anyone who chooses to use it.
This is a new form of consumer power. And it is available to everyone, right now, at no cost.
The professional on the other side of that divide
The consumer empowerment story has a mirror on the commercial side — and for professionals in sales, advisory, or client-facing roles, it is one of the most interesting shifts happening in business today.
As AI-empowered buyers arrive better informed, the rational layer of the commercial conversation — the data, the specifications, the comparisons, the pricing logic — is increasingly handled before the first handshake. In practice, most buyers aren't fully there yet. But the direction is clear, and it opens up something genuinely exciting for the best commercial professionals.
When the transactional and informational layer is handled by AI on both sides of the table, what remains is the most valuable and defensible thing a human being can offer in a commercial relationship — genuine trust, emotional intelligence, and the ability to guide someone through a decision that involves not just logic but identity, aspiration, and feeling. The professional who invests in that depth, augmented by AI on the rational side, becomes more valuable — not less.
This is not a threat to great salespeople. It is an accelerant. It removes the commodity layer and elevates the human one. The professionals who recognize this shift early and lean into it will find themselves operating in a market where their true strengths finally get the space they deserve.
For organizations: the strategic opportunity is clear. Invest in helping your commercial teams develop the emotional and relational depth that AI cannot replicate — while giving them the tools to handle the rational layer faster and better. The result is a sales force that is simultaneously more efficient and more human. That combination is very hard to compete with.
The floor is rising — and AI is learning to feel
There is one more dimension worth exploring — one that extends the opportunity further into the future.
The emotional layer of human interaction — trust, empathy, genuine connection — is today the most distinctively human contribution in any professional relationship. And while AI is beginning to develop emotional capabilities, current research is clear that a chatbot can identify sadness but cannot feel sorrow — it can generate comfort but cannot truly care.
That distinction matters. A 2024 survey found that 71% of customers believe AI can make service more empathetic, and 67% want AI that adjusts its tone depending on how they feel — which tells us that the demand for empathetic interaction is rising, not falling. The professionals and organizations that invest now in genuine relational depth are not just future-proofing themselves. They are meeting a growing human need that technology, however sophisticated, will struggle to fully satisfy.
Research shows that empathic AI has the potential to enrich certain affective experiences — but it also consistently confirms that authentic human presence carries a quality that resonates differently. The opportunity for professionals is to be so genuinely, distinctively human in their interactions that the comparison becomes irrelevant.
Source: Zendesk CX Report (2024); Frontiers in Psychology, "The Compassion Illusion" (2025)
One divide, two choices — and one clear direction
Let me bring this back to its simplest form.
AI is not creating a gap between the technologically sophisticated and the rest. It is creating a gap between those who choose to use it as a lever — to think better, work faster, decide more clearly, and serve more deeply — and those who haven't yet made that choice.
That gap exists between employees in the same team. Between consumers making the same purchase. Between sales professionals sitting across from the same customer. Between organizations competing in the same market.
What I described in my earlier article as "added value per capita" is now becoming measurable in real time — and the organizations that understand this won't just invest in AI tools. They will restructure how they measure, develop, and celebrate the people who generate that value.
The AI divide is here. It is growing. But it is also, uniquely among the great divides of our time, one that anyone can choose to step across — starting today.
The tools are accessible. The learning curve is manageable. The upside is immediate and compounding. All that is required is the intention to begin — and the leadership, at every level, to create the conditions where beginning feels not just possible, but exciting.
BCG's global AI at Work survey found that when leaders visibly demonstrate strong support for AI, frontline employees are significantly more likely to use it regularly, enjoy their jobs, and feel positive about their careers. That is the kind of organization worth building — and worth working for.
The question this article is really asking is not about AI at all. It is about agency. Are you ready to use yours?
