You’re in line at the grocery store, phone out, half-watching a news clip. The U.S. president is saying artificial intelligence will now be called “Super Intelligence.” He says it’s much bigger than the internet. Behind him, leaders from several major American tech companies have signed a White House accord. The clip ends. The person ahead of you is still deciding between two brands of oat milk. Nobody in this line is reacting. The cashier asks if you want a bag.
That gap between the announcement and the oat milk aisle is the whole story right now. According to TechCrunch, only 2% of consumers are buying what’s being called “AI, call it Super Intelligence.” Two percent. That’s the number worth sitting with, because it tells you something that the branding exercise doesn’t.
What actually changed
Less than it sounds like. The rename applies to terminology used by the U.S. executive branch. Existing laws don’t automatically change. Previously issued documents don’t change. AI isn’t renamed worldwide. If you run a small business and you’ve been using an AI scheduling assistant, nothing about your tool, your contract, or your workflow shifted because of this.
So what you’re looking at is a vocabulary decision inside one government’s paperwork, announced with a lot of volume, during a week when AI was already going to dominate conversation anyway — the United Nations General Assembly was underway, and Chinese President Xi Jinping was arriving in Washington for a state visit.
That timing matters. Renaming a technology right before you sit down across from your biggest competitor in that technology is a positioning move, not a product update.
Why the 2% number is more interesting than the rename
I write about AI agents for people who don’t work in tech, and the question I get most often isn’t “what should we call this?” It’s “what does it actually do for me today?”
Two percent suggests that question still doesn’t have a satisfying answer for most people. Not because the technology doesn’t work — plenty of it works — but because the pitch and the payoff haven’t met yet. You can tell someone this is bigger than the internet. The internet didn’t need that framing. It arrived with email, then search, then shopping, then video calls with your family. Each step was something you could explain to a relative in one sentence.
Super Intelligence, as a name, does the opposite. It makes the thing sound further away, not closer. It sounds like something that happens to you rather than something you use. If I told you a tool on your phone was “super intelligent,” your next thought probably isn’t “great, I’ll use it for my inbox.” It’s closer to “what’s it going to do to my job?”
Naming is marketing, and consumers can smell marketing
There’s a pattern here that anyone who’s watched tech cycles will recognize. When adoption is slower than expected, the naming gets grander. Crypto became web3. Virtual reality became the metaverse. The upgrade in vocabulary tends to arrive precisely when the product needs a new story.
Regular people are better at detecting this than the industry gives them credit for. A rename asks you to feel differently about something without giving you a new reason to. And the 2% figure suggests most consumers are declining the invitation.
None of which means the underlying technology is a dud. AI agents — the software that can take multi-step actions for you rather than just answering questions — are genuinely useful in narrow lanes right now. Sorting email. Drafting a first version of something. Pulling data out of messy documents. Those are small wins, and small wins are how adoption actually happens.
What to watch instead of the branding
If you want to know whether this technology is landing with ordinary people, don’t track the announcements. Track the boring indicators:
- Whether the tools you already pay for quietly get better at something you do weekly
- Whether you stop noticing the AI feature because it just works
- Whether people around you describe what they use it for without using the word “AI” at all
- Whether the number of people buying in starts climbing from 2% without anyone changing the name again
That last one is the real test. Adoption that depends on the right label is fragile. Adoption that happens because a thing saves you forty minutes on a Tuesday is solid.
My read, for what it’s worth as someone who spends all day translating this stuff: the rename will stick in federal documents and drift out of everyday speech within a year. Most people will keep saying AI, because it’s two syllables and it’s already in their vocabulary. Meanwhile the useful parts will keep getting absorbed into products so gradually that nobody announces them.
The oat milk line stays unimpressed. That’s not cynicism. That’s just how new technology earns its way in — one actual task at a time, no accord required.
đź•’ Published: