For years, new technologies followed a familiar pattern.
People saw them.
People wanted them.
Then the market exploded.
The internet felt magical.
The iPhone felt revolutionary.
Google Search felt instantly useful.
AI feels different.
People are not rushing toward it with excitement.
They are being pushed into it.
And that may become one of the most important business and societal questions of this decade.
A recent discussion between economist Paul Krugman and historian Heather Cox Richardson captured this tension surprisingly well.
Krugman made an observation that many people privately feel but few say openly:
“People hate AI.”
And honestly?
He may be right.
Not because AI is useless.
Not because it has no future.
But because this may be the first major technology wave where adoption is becoming partly coercive.
Companies are telling employees:
“You must use AI.”
That is historically unusual.
The early internet was joyful.
People wanted it.
AI often arrives differently:
faster workflows,
fewer people,
more pressure,
less patience,
constant fear of replacement,
and tools that sometimes hallucinate.
That creates resistance.
But Here’s the Strange Part
The resistance often disappears after people actually use AI in the right context.
That is the key distinction most AI debates completely miss.
Most people do not hate AI after experiencing a real benefit.
They hate the idea of AI before seeing where it genuinely helps them.
The Legal Industry Is a Perfect Example
For decades, legal work in Europe — especially for SMEs — has been built around friction:
waiting,
uncertainty,
expensive hourly billing,
repetitive research,
inaccessible language,
and non-lawyers depending on specialists for relatively routine decisions.
That system survived because there was no alternative.
Now there is.
At Lawise.ai and with Jurilo, we see this every day.
The first reaction from many HR managers, CEOs, Treuhänder, or SME administrators is often skepticism:
“AI for legal decisions? No chance.”
Then they try it.
And suddenly:
HR gets an answer in minutes instead of days,
repetitive legal research disappears,
external legal costs drop,
Swiss labour law becomes understandable,
routine legal work becomes accessible to non-lawyers,
and teams save enormous amounts of time.
Not because lawyers disappear.
But because friction disappears.
The Calculator Analogy
When pocket calculators appeared, accountants did not disappear.
But nobody wanted to pay premium fees anymore for manual arithmetic.
The value shifted upward:
interpretation,
judgment,
strategy,
business context.
AI is likely doing the same thing to many industries.
Especially legal and administrative work.
The Real Divide in AI
The AI market is currently mixing together two completely different things:
1. AI Hype
Massive datacenter spending.
Trillions invested.
Companies forcing adoption.
Executives using AI as a cover story for layoffs.
A lot of questionable business models.
Krugman may very well be right that parts of this are a bubble.
2. AI Utility
Actual workflows becoming dramatically faster.
Real operational pain disappearing.
Employees saving hours.
Organizations making decisions faster.
People gaining access to expertise they previously could not afford.
This part is very real.
Why Legal AI Is Different
Many AI tools today are still “generic assistants.”
That creates a major problem in legal work:
hallucinations.
And this is exactly where many people lose trust.
At Jurilo, we took a very different approach.
Instead of relying purely on large language models, Jurilo combines:
structured legal knowledge,
verified Swiss legal frameworks,
legal reasoning systems,
and AI-generated explanations.
The AI formulates the answer.
But the reasoning layer underneath is structured and validated.
That matters enormously when people make real-world decisions.
So How Far Can AI Go?
Probably much further than many people think.
But not because people love it.
Because eventually people care more about:
speed,
convenience,
clarity,
accessibility,
and cost savings
than about abstract ideological debates.
History shows this repeatedly.
Most transformative technologies are initially misunderstood.
Some are overhyped.
Some collapse.
Some become infrastructure.
The internet bubble burst too.
But the internet still changed the world.
The Most Important Lesson
The biggest barrier to AI adoption may not be technology.
It may be psychology.
People often need to experience the benefit themselves before their opinion changes.
That is why the future of AI may not be decided by LinkedIn debates or billion-dollar valuations.
It may be decided in millions of small moments where someone suddenly realizes:
“Wait… this actually helps me.”
Especially in legal work.
Especially in HR.
Especially in SMEs where time, complexity, and legal uncertainty are daily problems.
The Future Will Not Be Won by the Loudest AI Companies
It will be won by the companies that:
solve real problems,
reduce friction,
build trust,
and fit naturally into workflows.
And perhaps most importantly:
The winners may not be the companies that force people to use AI.
But the ones where people, after trying it once, never want to go back.
