By Byron V. Acohido

An email from Claude landed in my inbox Friday morning with a subject line that stopped me cold: “Using Claude for your everyday life.”

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Not “Unlock the power of AI” or “Transform your productivity.” Just… everyday life. Meal planning. Learning Spanish. Vacation planning. The kind of stuff you’d chat about over the fence with a neighbor.

The timing felt deliberate. I’ve been watching the AI marketing cycle long enough to know when the messaging shifts. So I went looking. Sure enough, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are running nearly identical campaigns right now — all three pitching themselves as your friendly everyday assistant, complete with warm visuals and relatable scenarios shot to look more like indie films than tech demos.

That’s not an accident. That’s an inflection point.

The Costco signal

I should have seen it coming last October. My Costco Connection membership magazine — the one that usually features rotisserie chicken recipes and deals on lawn furniture — ran a cheerful, broadly accessible column about AI in its tech section titled “AI for the better: Artificial intelligence can make your day-to-day tasks feel like a breeze.”

Nothing technical. No talk of large language models or neural networks. Just friendly prompts like “Been wondering about this AI thing?” followed by everyday use cases: creating dinner party invitations, booking accessible hotels in Europe, fixing blurry photos, getting restaurant recommendations with “free parking, vegan options and a solid cocktail list.”

The article’s opening line set the tone: “It’s OK to be intimidated by artificial intelligence technology, but it can be useful in your daily life.”

That’s the tell. When a retail membership magazine with 14 million readers is softening AI anxiety and pitching vacation planning as a gateway use case, you’re witnessing the leading edge of mass adoption. The messaging wasn’t aspirational or capability-focused. It was practical and reassuring — the same exact tone Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are all using right now in their synchronized campaigns.

When Costco is explaining ChatGPT to its members, you’re no longer in early-adopter territory. You’re approaching mass adoption. And the companies building these tools know it.

AI’s 4 year trajectory

To understand what’s happening now, you need to step back and look at the full arc. Generative AI has moved through four distinct phases in just four years — a pace that makes the smartphone revolution look leisurely by comparison.

•Wonder (2022) ChatGPT launched in late November 2022 and hit a million users in five days — a record that shattered Instagram’s 2.5-month sprint to the same milestone. Two months later, it crossed 100 million monthly users, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history. It was a “holy shit, look what this can do” moment, mostly among tech enthusiasts and early adopters. Experimental. Playful. Focused on possibility. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham captured the mood: “The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing.”

•Explosion (2023)  GPT-4 arrived in March 2023, a major capability leap. Days later, on March 21, Google scrambled to launch Bard (later Gemini) in the U.S. and U.K., declaring a “code red” emergency after Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI threatened its search dominance. CEO Sundar Pichai later admitted Google had “took a souped-up Civic and kind of put it in a race with more powerful cars.” Competition heated up. The media cycle oscillated between “AI will change everything” and “AI will take your job.” Enterprise started paying serious attention, but usage remained heavily tech-forward. Marketing was still capability-focused: look at the amazing things our AI can do.

•Maturation (2024) The tools stabilized. Business workflows bent around them. Developers, writers, marketers, and customer service teams quietly integrated AI into daily operations. Subscription models normalized. By August 2024, ChatGPT reached 200 million weekly active users — double the 100 million it had in November 2023. Ninety-two percent of Fortune 500 companies were using OpenAI’s products. A study found that over 70 percent of ChatGPT usage was now personal, not work-related. But a question emerged: how do you grow beyond the early adopters who were already sold?

•Mainstream Push (2025-2026). And that brings us to now.

OpenAI launched its largest brand campaign ever in late September 2025, running through this year. The ads — shot on 35mm film by director Miles Jay and debuting during NFL Primetime — show people using ChatGPT for cooking dates, planning road trips, hitting fitness goals. The tagline: “ChatGPT opens up everyday possibilities.” The campaign, created in-house with creative agency Isle of Any, reflects a user base that had grown to 700 million weekly users. “Over 700 million people around the world now use ChatGPT each week,” said OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch. “The campaign celebrates them.”

Google’s Gemini user base grew from 450 million monthly actives in July 2025 to 650 million by October, fueled in part by the viral Nano Banana image generator launched in August. And now Claude’s jumping in with the same messaging: life assistant, learning coach, decision support.

When three competitors run identical campaigns simultaneously, it’s not coincidence. It’s coordination around a shared market reality: the technology has matured enough that the next growth phase requires reaching people who don’t think of themselves as “tech people” at all.

What changed

Here’s what I’ve noticed from the trenches over the past year: usage has accelerated and deepened across the board. Not just among professionals, but among everyday individuals who’ve adopted these tools faster than their employers, their schools, or their policymakers expected.

It’s the BYOD cycle all over again — bring your own device — except now it’s bring your own AI. Invisible. Viral. Faster than institutional controls can track.

A study published last fall found that over 70 percent of ChatGPT usage is now personal, not work-related. People are using it to plan vacations, troubleshoot appliances, draft emails, learn languages — exactly the scenarios these new campaigns are highlighting.

The companies aren’t selling a vision anymore. They’re reflecting behavior that’s already happening and trying to normalize it further.

Monetization reckoning

But there’s a harder edge beneath the friendly marketing. These companies are burning billions of dollars annually to run these systems. OpenAI reportedly faces over $7 billion in operational costs. The free-growth phase is ending.

ChatGPT just announced this week that ads are coming to its free tier — clearly labeled, appearing at the bottom of responses when there’s a “relevant sponsored product.” Google has reportedly told advertisers that Gemini ads are coming in 2026, though executives publicly denied it.

The pivot to “everyday life” messaging isn’t just about growth. It’s about justifying monetization to a user base that’s gotten used to free access.

What it all means

We’ve reached the point where AI is transitioning from technological marvel to mundane infrastructure — like GPS, like cloud storage, like streaming video. The question is no longer “Will people adopt this?” The question is: “Can governance, ethics, and trust mechanisms catch up to adoption that’s already underway?”

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth I keep hearing from people who actually build these systems: the tools are still brittle. They work well enough to be useful, but not well enough to be fully reliable. We’re embedding them into daily life before we’ve solved the foundational problems of accuracy, transparency, and accountability.

When your helpful AI neighbor starts showing you ads, remember: the infrastructure is appearing before the safeguards. And once dependency sets in, it’s a lot harder to ask the hard questions about whether this thing was ready in the first place.

That’s what I’m watching now. Not the marketing. The gap.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(Editor’s note: I used ChatGPT-4o to accelerate and refine research, assist in distilling complex observations, and serve as a tightly controlled drafting instrument, applied iteratively under my direction. The analysis, conclusions, and the final wordsmithing of the published text are entirely my own.)

January 19th, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories