Every generation gets a “where were you when” moment—Man on the Moon, the launch of Windows 95, the iPhone keynote. In tech, these moments are inflection points: the places where pace, adoption, and public imagination collide. For my money, nothing in the last half-century comes close to the velocity of end-user-facing AI since the launch of ChatGPT. The personal computer? SaaS? Both reshaped the world, but by comparison, their rollouts look positively glacial.
Let’s talk stats. The first true “personal computer,” the Altair 8800, debuted in 1975. It was followed by the Apple II, TRS-80, and eventually the IBM PC. Even with Jobs and Gates mythologizing the movement, it took over a decade to put a PC in 10% of U.S. homes, with true market penetration taking nearly 20 years. The pace was physical: manufacturing, shipping, marketing, waiting for Moore’s Law to double what your box could do. In 1984, there were fewer than 10 million PCs in U.S. homes. Today? Three billion smartphones act as portable supercomputers.
Fast forward to SaaS. Salesforce launched in 1999, pitching “No Software.” The model was revolutionary—no CDs, no IT teams. But SaaS still took years to become the norm. By 2010, cloud-based applications accounted for barely 10% of enterprise software spend. SaaS changed business models, but adoption was hand-to-hand combat, fighting inertia and trust issues.
Now, let’s look at ChatGPT. OpenAI opened the doors to the public in November 2022. Within five days, a million users. In two months, over 100 million. TikTok, the previous record holder, took nine months. SaaS legends took years. AI did it in weeks. We’re seeing hundreds of millions of people and tens of thousands of businesses bolt AI into daily workflows—marketing, customer service, coding, contracts—almost overnight. The infrastructure was there (thanks, SaaS/cloud), but the hunger for capability was explosive.
Statistically, AI’s user growth is orders of magnitude faster. The user base for generative AI products in 2025? Estimated at over 500 million active monthly users worldwide. Contrast that with the PC: less than five million in its first five years. With SaaS: the first 10 million paid Salesforce users took a decade.
The difference is profound: AI is not just riding on the shoulders of the giants that came before—it’s sprinting, unencumbered, thanks to those very foundations. This is what exponential really looks like. For those of us in marketing and communications, the urgency is simple: adapt or become a case study for obsolescence.