The AI Revolution: A Timeline of Consumer Adoption and Its Tidal Wave on Business

Over the last two years, AI has gone from an interesting experiment to the default interface for how we work. ChatGPT unlocked the mainstream moment and has continued to disrupt both consumer and business behavior, as well as the financial markets, as we knew them. We continue to see frontier models and new players and products emerge from both startups to enterprise household names. From Google Gemini’s upheaval of search behavior, to Microsoft making Copilot a default in its products, to Apple announcing its own “Apple Intelligence” that infuses AI into everyday apps on hundreds of millions of phones–AI has dominated and will continue to dominate over the next 12 to 24 months. 

From a business standpoint, this means that the near-term will be about redesigning workflows, roles and talent strategies around an always-on layer of artificial intelligence. One day AI was a novelty in the browser, the next, no one drafted a report or answered a customer email without it. So where does Prodigy fit into this emerging new world of AI? First we must discuss how we got here.

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) traces back to academic research in the 1950s, but its journey into the hands of the average consumer—and the subsequent rapid transformation of the business landscape—has been a story of evolving technology and shifting societal norms. While businesses began leveraging AI in limited capacities decades ago (e.g., automated systems in manufacturing in the 60s and 70s), the consumer market's embrace has driven a revolution, making AI the most influential technology for modern business.

A Timeline of Consumer AI and Business Impact

The path from niche technology to everyday tool has been marked by key consumer-facing milestones:

Early Integration: The 1990s and 2000s

AI first "invisibly crept" into daily life, primarily through the internet and e-commerce. Long before it was a buzzword, artificial intelligence was already shaping what we saw online, tailoring recommendations, optimizing search results, and powering the behind-the-scenes systems that made online shopping feel increasingly intuitive. Without most people realizing it, AI became woven into everyday digital interactions, laying the foundation for the more visible and transformative AI-driven experiences we see today.

Mid-1990s: The rise of e-commerce led to the development of recommendation systems (e.g., Amazon's product suggestions, Netflix's content picks). This marked a significant business shift toward personalized customer experiences based on data analysis.

Late 2000s: Companies like Twitter and Facebook began widely using AI for ad targeting and user experience algorithms.

2011: Apple introduced Siri, the first widely popular virtual assistant, making natural language processing (NLP) a mainstream consumer technology.

The Inflection Point: The 2020s

The past few years have seen an unprecedented acceleration in AI capabilities and adoption.

2022 (Late): The release of generative AI models like ChatGPT (OpenAI) and stable image generators sparked a massive surge in public interest and use. This breakout product demonstrated AI's potential for creative and cognitive tasks, not just automation.

2023: Generative AI became the dominant conversation, with the share of businesses reporting regular use of AI nearly doubling in ten months. Companies began using AI for content creation, campaign design, and customer experience enhancement at an accelerated pace.

(Columbus, 2018)

2024: Surveys indicated widespread adoption of consumer AI for personal tasks (47% of users) while businesses ramped up experimentation and began scaling programs. The focus shifted to using AI to enhance existing jobs and boost efficiency rather than solely focusing on job replacement.

2025: AI has reached an inflection point with the launch of GPT-5, pushing these chatbots mainstream. The new AI-native browser Atlas is transforming how people interact with the web, with a blend of search and automation with personalized agents in real time. By October, OpenAI’s Valuation soared past $500 billion, signaling massive confidence in AI’s future. Most businesses are still trying to understand what this shift means for competitive advantage in the AI market.

AI Business Transformation: Now and Next

Current Reality: 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, delivering tangible improvements in productivity, customer engagement, and decision-making across industries.

The Next 24 Months:

Autonomous AI Agents: Will manage 20%+ of marketing workloads within 2-3 years, automatically identifying opportunities, managing supply chains, and handling customer service.

Business Model Revolution: Expect "shipping-then-shopping" retail models where AI anticipates and delivers products before customers order.

Accelerated Innovation: In-silico R&D will cut product development time by 50%

Workforce Evolution: Companies will prioritize reskilling employees to work alongside AI rather than replacing them, with new roles emerging to manage AI systems.

(Columbus, 2018)

Prodigy’s Role in The AI Era: 

When you look at the history of how far AI has come it is clear to see the rapid progression. A common thread is that AI is increasing the speed of creation and the volume of output. In short, this is great for production but it creates an entirely new challenge for operations. When content is produced faster and more often, spending becomes harder to track, manage and optimize. That is the problem that we built Prodigy to solve. 

While generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Co-Pilot help marketers, write copy, build concepts, test ideas and automate workflows, what they can’t do is analyze marketing data, tell you where your dollars are going, if those dollars are efficient, or how to forecast spending. Prodigy can answer those questions, and more. In other words, if ChatGPT is helping teams create more, Prodigy is making sure every dollar behind that creation is well spent. 

We are entering a phase where AI agents will manage campaign workflows, creative routing, and even vendor selections. When that happens, the spend will move faster than humans can manually track. Prodigy becomes the control center that keeps the organization aligned with what AI is producing. The next frontier is not only creating more with AI, but allocating and optimizing these new ideas using speciality AI tools, governed by human experts, which is the Prodigy promise.

References

Columbus, L. (2018, January 12). 10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective On Artificial Intelligence's Growth. Forbes. Retrieved November 17, 2025, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/01/12/10-charts-that-will-change-your-perspective-on-artificial-intelligences-growth/