Crossing Market Chasms in the Age of AI

After building and releasing artificial intelligence products, many industry founders are scratching their heads, asking: “Why isn’t this taking off?” It’s an understandable question. After all, based on the old new tech product playbook, the assumption at launch is that a bunch of innovators will likely quickly adopt your product, offering startups some support out of the gate. And yet, in the AI era, the logic behind this assumption breaks down more often than it holds.

In Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, aka “the bible of entrepreneurial marketing,” we learn about the challenges that startups selling disruptive technology face as they strive to reach risk-averse mainstream customers. This involves surviving a painful cycle of adoption that starts with innovators, who provide a lifeline to companies as they attempt to reach a critical mass of consumers who aren’t willing to buy technology simply because “they like to try new things.”

As Moore noted, mainstream customers want the “whole product” solution that solves their problem, not just a clever promising tool. But to get to them, companies must first cross a small chasm that exists between innovators and early adopters and then a major one that separates other market segments (early majority, late majority, and laggards). Prior to the AI revolution, the first major barrier to mass adoption was the second chasm. But the AI revolution has changed how startups should look at Moore’s Crossing the Chasm framework. 

In the pre-AI era, a good tech product was almost certain to find some clients that believed in the solution being proposed as they aimed to achieve an advantage compared to their main competitors. As a result, Moore’s framework started with innovators: people eager to test new technologies. But support from this segment is no longer a given. Innovators still exist, but they are overwhelmed in an AI-powered world in which new tech products are being announced every day instead of every now and then.

Keep in mind that B2B customers now face a flood of tools that all appear plausible because AI has made building cheap. And with APIs, open-source models, and “vibe coding,” small teams can ship capable software fast. This has created an overload of options, which has opened a new chasm that tech products must cross on the journey to mass adoption.

“Moore’s framework isn’t obsolete, but there is now an extra—hopefully smaller—chasm that must be crossed on the road to mass adoption.”

In today’s market, innovators looking at AI offerings don’t behave like explorers willing to try almost anything new. They behave like exhausted shoppers who have already seen numerous demos promising the same outcome in slightly different language. As a result, startup ventures now must fight to get these exhausted shoppers on board just to enter the market.

Simply put, the first barrier to mass adoption is no longer about being feasible. It is about being worthy of attention because even the people who love new tech the most don’t have the time or cognitive space to care about every new tool being offered, especially when they sound the same.

This “abundance” of similar options is the essence of the new “pre-innovator” chasm that new products must cross just to reach innovators. Here’s some advice on how to cross it:

• Position your product around a trigger instead of a capability: Stop describing what the product does and start describing when a buyer feels forced to act. A trigger is concrete: a hiring freeze, a backlog spike, a compliance change, a customer churn problem, a missed KPI target. When you anchor your story in a trigger, you stop competing with generic “AI productivity” promises and start competing with inaction.
• Be extremely specific about who you are targeting: In option-heavy markets, broad positioning makes you invisible. “Teams” is not a segment. “Knowledge workers” is not a segment. “Anyone who writes” is not a segment. Defining your beachhead user is now more important than it was when crossing the big scary chasm between the early adopters and early majority was your first major barrier to mass adoption.
• Prove pain in minutes, not in months: Try to show the cost of doing nothing. If the buyer feels the pain clearly, your product becomes one of a few urgent options rather than one of many interesting ones.

Moore’s framework isn’t obsolete, but there is now an extra—hopefully smaller—chasm that must be crossed on the road to mass adoption. That means many cool new AI products will die before they even reach innovators. But with the right timing and messaging, startup ventures can still reach market innovators and at least get a chance to attempt a crossing of Moore’s original chasms.