Your AI Adoption Lift Is a Selection Effect
It is driving next quarter's roadmap.Nobody randomized the AI assistant. It shipped to eligible accounts, some of them turned it on, and the analytics team compared the ones that did against the ones that did not.That comparison is not an effect. The feature did not make those accounts engaged.
- ▪It is driving next quarter's roadmap.Nobody randomized the AI assistant.
- ▪It shipped to eligible accounts, some of them turned it on, and the analytics team compared the ones that did against the ones that did not.That comparison is not an effect.
- ▪The feature did not make those accounts engaged.
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Record
| Original publisher | Towards Data Science |
| Canonical URL | https://towardsdatascience.com/your-ai-adoption-lift-is-a-selection-effect/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:00:02 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-13T12:16:50.270Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-13T12:16:50.270Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 3vOCNaQVnP9f · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
LLM ApplicationsYour AI Adoption Lift Is a Selection EffectA practitioner's guide to estimating what an opt-in AI feature actually did, when nobody randomized it.William GiengSeptember 13, 202617 min readSomewhere in your company there is a slide that says something like this: customers who enabled the AI assistant retain 15 points better than customers who did not. It has a bar chart. It has been in three executive reviews. It is driving next quarter's roadmap.Nobody randomized the AI assistant. It shipped to eligible accounts, some of them turned it on, and the analytics team compared the ones that did against the ones that did not.That comparison is not an effect. It is a description of who opts in. The feature did not make those accounts engaged.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Towards Data Science.
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