Megan Kelley, Head of Research for Fidelity Center for Applied Technology at Fidelity Investments.
When identifying the trends and technologies that could change our future, we find two types of signals.
1. Obscure, very early ones, that you struggle to determine if they’re real and what they could mean. These include head-scratchers like a man marrying a virtual avatar or awe-provokers like a neural implant translating brain signals into spoken words that allow a person who is paralyzed to talk.
2. Large, headline-dominating whiplashers, like ChatGPT attracting 100 million active users in its first two months. In these cases, tools and technologies that have bubbled along for years in research labs or obscure corners of the web suddenly appear in dinner table conversations and prompt hastily gathered strategy sessions.
As different as these two types of signals are, both are important and require inspection. But how do we assess which one could presage lasting seismic change? We consider whether the underlying tools and behaviors are being adopted or truly absorbed.
While it’s tempting to use adoption as a proxy for impact and potential, adoption alone isn’t sufficient to drive lasting change. After all, the “adoption” rate for work-from-home was just about 100% a few years ago for a period of time, but the lasting impact of that shift remains to be seen. Tens of millions may have tried GenAI tools by now, but the enduring implications, risks and opportunities are still inchoate.
It’s important to look for emerging technologies and behaviors that will have legs beyond initial bursts of adoption. Instead, business leaders should focus on absorption. Think of absorption as adoption that holds, that fundamentally changes how people think and behave. It would be as if you spotted a viral social media dance that didn’t just reign on wedding reception dance floors for one summer but forever changed how humans move. Absorption is adoption to the point where there’s no going back.
Three elements help distinguish when something moves from adoption to absorption. The first is obvious but underappreciated: Change takes time. It takes time for us to wrap our heads around what a new technology could mean in our lives. We need time to use a new tool enough, build trust in it and get comfortable with it before it starts to change how we think, behave and imagine different futures it could enable.
For example, think back to when you started using Waze. Sure, you’d follow its navigation cues, turning left or right when it prompted you. You were an “adopter,” but your mental model hadn’t changed—Waze was just a better map. However, when you started asking it when to leave for the airport to make your flight, that’s when your mental model shifted. Your thinking and behaviors had changed; you had incorporated real-time optimization algorithms into your daily life, and there was no turning back. That is absorption.
Absorption doesn’t happen overnight because it takes time to see, imagine and surface real, purpose-fit use cases that unlock a technology’s true potential. The most successful mobile apps weren’t bundled into the first iOS release. Bursts of adoption can accelerate this process; heightened awareness and excitement around a technology attracts bright minds and resources to the space, and advances often quickly build upon each other.
In just one year since the launch of GPT-3.5, newer models have emerged that rival its performance—some of which can even run on phones. More global access to cost-efficient models running locally on devices could spur more applications built and tested in more industries, sparking adoption that leads to true absorption and lasting change.
Absorption takes time, but we can’t just throw up our hands and wait. Instead, we should scour the landscape for signs of the second element: growing legitimacy. Look for how well builders and evangelists address the hard questions: What does this technology do better than what it’s intended to replace? What are the second-order impacts on things like the environment, labor force or systemic stability? How do builders and their surrounding community deal with bad actors who emerge?
On a technical front, a given technology must not just withstand hacks and sabotage attempts, but the societal narratives about its future benefits must outlast and outshine the ones about its potential for misuse. Growing legitimacy can look like active litigation, legislative requests for industry comments on an emerging technology or even the issuance of an executive order—as we have seen with digital assets and AI.
Technologies don’t reach absorption in a vacuum. Instead, they connect with and leverage the momentum of other technologies and behaviors. Symbiosis is the third element we look for as a sign of absorption. The ability to execute a mobile payment is built upon many symbiotic technologies and behaviors: the advent of biometric authentication, the integration of payment providers via embedded finance APIs and the near-universal penetration of smartphones. Tens of millions of smartphone users have shifted their mental models to expect instant digital execution of payments from anywhere.
Anybody trying to understand which opportunities and threats lie ahead needs to distinguish between the signals that matter and the ones they can ignore. The opportunity to observe a truly novel technology or consumer trend that moves from adoption to absorption in ways that change the world is rare. Yet, in our lifetimes, we’ve seen the birth of smartphones that changed how we interact with the world and each other, social platforms that changed how we create, share and monetize content and distributed computing and processing power that changed the ability to start and grow a business.
Whether you’re reviewing an exciting set of growth projections from a startup, a buzzword that is dominating the media cycle or a thought-provoking paper from a university lab, considering where the ideas are on the path from adoption to absorption can you help ask the right questions and launch experiments at the right moment.
Unless otherwise noted, the opinions provided are those of the author and not necessarily those of Fidelity Investments or its affiliates.
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