Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it

TechCrunch’s Equity podcast (Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane) titles the week plainly: call it AI or Super Intelligence — only about 2% of consumers are buying it. The episode rundown pairs that claim with the White House gathering major tech CEOs — including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei — for a safety pledge Trump called “morally binding,” plus an executive order rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” while Meta and OpenAI put friendlier faces on products and enterprise still looks like where the money is.

The show also digs into picky public markets (Oura pulling an IPO, Anthropic’s leaked S-1, OpenAI leaning private again) and deals like Quartermaster’s $140M maritime sensors raise, Atomic running most of DoorDash’s purchasing, and Charter Space’s $5M satellite insurance round. The podcast page itself is a thin blurb; the 2% line is the hosts’ framing of consumer paid adoption, not a full methods dump in the shownotes.

We’re with the title’s cold water.

Renaming the category and shipping blobby agents is demand-side cosplay if wallets don’t open. The industry already knows this in private: enterprise contracts and vertical expansion pay the bills; consumer ARPU crawls. Friendly faces on Muse and Dots can grow usage. Usage without payment — or with payment that can’t cover inference — is a strategy only if ads, take-rates, or upsell-to-work fill the gap.

Useful AI for regular people is still worth building. We’re not sneering at free agents that book a table or redesign a site. We are saying the desk should separate cultural saturation from business saturation. A morally binding pledge in a White House photo line doesn’t change P&L. Neither does insisting the word “artificial” sounds fake.

I’m watching whether consumer agent hype this month moves paid penetration, or whether the next Equity tape is still talking about a low-single-digit buyers’ club while CEOs toast Super Intelligence. The likelier read: enterprise keeps compounding, consumer stays a brand and data play, and the 2% statistic remains the adult in the room.

Related TechCrunch reporting the same week cites a16z/PNC figures around ~2.2% of consumers paying for AI as of May at roughly $31/month average — the quantitative backdrop Equity is gesturing at. Treat the podcast’s “2%” as headline framing pending the audio.