“Soon everyone will have their own AI.” We hear it constantly, usually said with a kind of moral satisfaction. But when I look at the organisations I train, or even small everyday interactions in the workplace, the gap is obvious. In the same meeting, I see one person using an integrated agent that handles their inbox, calendar, and research… and another person quietly typing into a free chatbot on a second screen.
Technically, both are using AI.
Practically, they are living in different cognitive worlds.
This gap is the story we are not telling enough. The promise that “everyone will have an AI assistant” was supposed to be the moment intelligence became a public utility. But late 2025 tells a different story: personal AI is not entering society as a universal equalizer. It is arriving as a stratifying force: Unlike the broadband divide, which was binary (online vs. offline), the AI divide is gradient. It is about the fidelity of the intelligence you access—the quality, integration, an…
