# The Gap of Imagination > Most people use AI the same way they could have in November 2022. The model family is now solving 100-year-old math problems. The users are asking it to reorganize a calendar. Alvaro Higes (Luzia, 65M users) names this the *gap of imagination*: for a user to extract value from AI, three things must happen simultaneously — AI can actually do it, the user discovers that it can, and the user decides to try it. The first is the AI labs' job. The second and third are the product builders' job. The industry has mostly solved adoption. It has mostly failed at value extraction. --- ## The EA Problem A great executive assistant doesn't manage calendars. It frames decisions before you have to make them, filters ruthlessly what deserves your attention, and closes every loop. AI delivers roughly 70% of that today. Most users are getting 0%. The gap between 0% and 70% is not a model problem. It's an imagination problem: if you've never had an EA, you can't picture the ceiling, so you settle for the floor you stumbled onto. --- ## Two Failures That Compound **1. Building for demos, not defaults.** Products optimise for the flashy Loom video, not the 80% of users who don't spend the day behind a screen. Christensen's rule: to change a default, the experience must be 10x better — not "AI-powered" better, actually better in a way users feel immediately. **2. Nobody closes the imagination gap.** Where AI is good and where it isn't is not documented anywhere that matters — not beyond evals and benchmarks that mean nothing to 99.9% of people. Product builders must imagine on behalf of users, showing them what good looks like before they can ask for it. --- ## Why It Matters Beyond Product For consumer AI companies, closing this gap is existential — it's the difference between something that sticks and something people try once. More broadly: if the gap doesn't close, the distance between those who use AI at its full potential and those who don't becomes too wide to bridge. That's not a product problem. It's a society problem. --- **Related:** [[AI Eats Services Not Software]] | [[Observed Exposure — Anthropic's AI Penetration Metric]] Tags: #AIstrategy #product #adoption #consumerAI