"Everyone is using AI for everything" is really "some people are using AI for some things," argues DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg, and the survey data backs him up.
Triangulating across Microsoft, the Searchlight Institute and other sources, he lands on a rough split: about a third of Americans actively use AI, a third use it occasionally, and a third not at all. Microsoft's own usage data puts working-age adoption above 30 percent, up just three points since the end of 2025, which means roughly 70 percent still aren't using it. More striking, Gen Z, the cohort most aware of AI, has seen adoption all but stall over the past year even as the models got better.
Weinberg's analogy is meat: most Americans eat it, most are actively cutting back, and a real slice abstains entirely, for reasons of health, cost, ethics and value. His point for anyone building agents is that a large group has tried current AI and chosen to limit it, which is a market signal, not a rounding error.