Generative AI is evolving along two distinct tracks: on one side, savvy users are building their own retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, personal agents, or even small language models (SLMs) tailored to their contexts and data. On the other, the majority are content with “LLMs out of the box”: Open a page, type a query, copy the output, paste it elsewhere. That divide — between builders and consumers — is shaping not only how AI is used but also whether it delivers value at all.
The difference is not just individual skill. It’s also organizational. Companies are discovering that there are two categories of AI use: the administrative (summarize a report, draft a memo, produce boilerplate code) and the strategic (deploy agentic systems to automate functions, replace SaaS applica