Norvig’s law
Norvig’s law states that any technology that surpasses 90% adoption saturates its market and stops being disruptive. It is attributed to Peter Norvig, director of research at Google and co-author of the widely used textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
The law is a caution about extrapolating growth curves. A technology that is still gaining market share is, by definition, still displacing something else, and its continued growth is newsworthy and disruptive to incumbents. Once it has already captured the overwhelming majority of its addressable market, further growth has nowhere left to come from. What was a story of disruption becomes, instead, a story of maintenance and incremental improvement. Norvig’s law is a reminder that a technology’s most dramatic phase of impact is bounded, and that near-total market share is a sign that the disruptive period is ending rather than a sign of unstoppable momentum.
The law is commonly invoked in discussions of AI and machine learning adoption curves, as a counterweight to the assumption that a technology’s current trajectory of growth will continue indefinitely once it already dominates its space.