Well the second group in your taxonomy are very unserious, I mean that's fine, it's OK to use an AI tool for vibing and self-amusement, there will be an entire multi-billion dollar entertainment industry which will grow up around that. In my personal experience, decisionmakers who fell into this camp and were frothing at the mouth about making serious business decisions this way are already starting to get a reality check.

From my perspective the distinction is more on the supply side and we have two generations of AI tools. The first generation was simply talking to a chatbot in a web UI and it's still got its uses, you chat and build up a context with it, it's relying heavily on its training data, maybe it's reading one file.

The second generation leans into RAG and agentic capabilities (if you can glob and grep or otherwise run a search, congrats you have v1 of your RAG strategy). This is where Gemini actually scans all the docs in our Google Workspace and produces a proposal similar to ones we've written before. (Do we even need document templates anymore?) Or where you start a new programming project and Claude can write all the boilerplate, deploy and set up a barebones test suite within a couple of minutes. There's no doubt that these types of tools give us new capabilities and in some cases save a lot more time than just babbling into chatgpt.com.

I think this accounts for a lot of differences in terms of reported productivity by the sane users. I was way less enthusiastic about AI productivity gains before I discovered the "gen 2" applications.