As ChatGPT and generative AI explode in popularity, CEOs, engineers, executives, and other employees at myriad companies begin experimenting with the tools
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after early adopters were using ChatGPT to draft emails and find creative inspiration, usage has moved up the org chart: WSJ now reports CEOs, engineers, scientists, and rank-and-file employees across many companies experimenting with the tool to speed up tasks or avoid being left behind. What began as consumer curiosity is becoming informal workplace practice.
That bottom-up pull is what venture capital is pricing in — PitchBook's figures show AI startup investment jumping from $1.5B in 2020 to $5.9B+ since the start of 2022 as investors chase the demand these workplace experiments signal. The question for companies is whether employee-led adoption becomes policy or gets absorbed into sanctioned products.
First-order effects
- Employees at numerous companies are now routing real work tasks through ChatGPT and similar tools, giving OpenAI unpaid distribution inside enterprises before any procurement decision is made.
Second-order effects
- Investors are responding directly: the VC rush documented by Reuters/PitchBook channels billions toward generative AI startups, and incumbent software vendors face pressure to bolt generative features onto their own products before employees substitute around them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AI adoption concentrates returns in a few labs and platform owners rather than spreading evenly — consistent with the Bloomberg retrospective finding that three years of AI mania left the S&P 500 more top-heavy around Big Tech. Workplace norms, data-governance rules, and eventually regulation will have to catch up to tools employees adopted first.
The trend: Workplace software adoption is flipping from top-down IT procurement to bottom-up employee choice, with ChatGPT as the template case of workers pulling generative AI into the office ahead of their employers.