The novelty phase of conversational artificial intelligence has officially ended, giving way to a more formidable market phase: structural reliance. While nearly half of U.S. consumers have now interfaced with AI assistants, the real story isn’t the influx of new users — it’s the stickiness among the incumbents.
The February 2026 “Agentic AI Report” by PYMNTS Intelligence noted that while 49% of adult Americans had used a conversational AI assistant by December, growth in usage is no longer being driven by new-user acquisition. Based on a U.S. Census-balanced survey of 2,439 U.S. adult consumers conducted between Dec. 9, 2025, and Jan. 5, 2026, the report showed that growth is instead being driven by intensifying engagement among existing users, who are embedding AI into daily workflows, from shopping discovery to financial management.
Adoption Stabilizes, Engagement Deepens
Between October and December overall, the report found that AI usage rates remained largely flat across demographic groups. That plateau indicates that while adoption levels have reached roughly half of U.S. adults, incremental growth now faces more skeptical or reluctant consumers.
The segmentation data reveals a clear structure. Power users, defined as those performing 27 or more distinct AI-driven tasks per month, represent 10% of all consumers and 19% of millennials.
Mainstream users account for 27% of consumers, while light users make up 10%. Holdouts, who have not used AI and cite specific reasons for avoiding it, still represent 53% of the population and 72% of baby boomers.
What differentiates these groups is not frequency alone, but breadth. Light users average roughly two activities per month. Mainstream users average eight. Power users increased reliance on the tech and their total activity count from 25 in September to 27 in December.
Crucially, Power users aren’t just asking complex questions; they are offloading “mundane” logistics — travel planning and shopping lists — into AI workflows. This suggests that AI is successfully embedding itself into the daily habit loop, the holy grail for any digital platform. This deepening engagement aligns with previous PYMNTS findings that more than 60% of consumers now start at least one daily task with AI.
AI as a Replacement Channel
Conversational AI is increasingly displacing, rather than complementing, traditional search in several measured categories, including shopping and financial workflows.
In shopping discovery tasks, power users were almost a third more likely in December than in November to report replacing their previous search methods with AI-driven alternatives.
Among mainstream users, replacement rose from 22% to 30% month over month. Light users remained largely unchanged at roughly 11%. The same dynamic appears in purchasing behavior. Nearly half of power users, or 48%, report supplanting old approaches with AI-driven alternatives. Mainstream users saw replacement climb from 22% to 32%.
Financial management shows a similar pattern, with consumers ramping up their use of AI-based tools to manage their money. By December, 37% of power users reported using native AI platforms as their primary tool for managing finances and banking, Among the middle-of-the-road mainstream users, the share doubled from 14% to 28% in one month.
The behavioral shift is reinforced by primary-channel data. In December, 34% of power users relied on native AI interfaces such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Perplexity as their most-used method for shopping discovery, up from 22% in November. Even light users saw reliance rise from 5% to 16%.
Platform Concentration and Competitive Implications
The report also highlights which platforms get the most use. More than 4 in 5 AI users, or 83%, have used ChatGPT at least once, compared with 48% for Google Gemini and 30% for Microsoft Copilot.
The numbers get closer with the use of smartphone assistants. Within those embedded assistants, ChatGPT and Gemini are tied at 40% usage each, while 37% of consumers have used Google Assistant.
Power users are more likely to test multiple platforms, using different tools for web search, coding, ecosystem integration or specialized queries. Mainstream and light users tend to consolidate around a single familiar interface. These findings support PYMNTS reporting that consumers are “locking AI habits early.” Once AI becomes the first step in a workflow, it increasingly becomes the default.
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