You’ve probably seen it happen. A new tool explodes across your social media feeds, your team starts asking questions, and you’re left wondering whether to embrace it or ignore it. Last month’s OpenClaw rollout is the latest reminder of how chaotic technology adoption really is.
Technology adoption curves are depicted as neat, predictable diagrams, a smooth line moving from innovators to early adopters to the early majority and eventually to late adopters.
In textbooks, the curve looks calm. In real life, it feels more like a storm.
Watching the recent surge of interest around OpenClaw, an open-source AI automation tool that lets developers and non-developers build custom autonomous agents, highlights this contrast clearly.
The tool moved rapidly from Clawdbot to MoltBot to OpenClaw. While its identity was in motion, innovators and early adopters embraced it with enthusiasm. Within days, countless articles and YouTube videos appeared with reviews, tutorials, and predictions about how it would reshape everything.
Within another week, we began hearing a more complete message. People still praised its power, but they also surfaced significant security weaknesses and vulnerabilities that accompany those capabilities.
My goal in this post is less about celebrating OpenClaw itself and more about understanding the real-world adoption pattern that I’ve seen countless times.
Phase 1: The Enthusiasts Light the Fuse
Early adopters jump in first. They’re curious, energetic, and quick to celebrate what they’ve discovered.
They imagine what could be, long before most people fully understand what exists today. They test edge cases, build experiments, share demos, and push boundaries simply because the possibility fascinates them.
This group rarely waits for permission. Their momentum gives a new idea its initial lift.
Phase 2: Quiet Experimenters Emerge
Close behind them comes a second tier of users who watch carefully and learn before speaking.
They begin to explore the tool in private, trying things on their own terms rather than joining the public conversation. Their silence can look like hesitation but usually signals careful attention and research.
They want confidence before committing.
Phase 3: The Tribalization of Opinion
At the same time, people who barely understand the technology start lining up on all sides of the debate as if it were a political issue.
Some declare that it will transform everything. Others warn that it is reckless or dangerous. Still others dismiss it as a passing fad.
Much of this reaction grows from identity, fear, or ideology rather than direct experience. The conversation gets louder while genuine clarity is harder to find.
Phase 4: Rapid Evolution and Ecosystem Growth
If the tool has real potential, the surrounding environment begins to move quickly.
The creators ship frequent updates of their new product. Early adopters invent new uses that nobody predicted. Supporting products (like Cloudflare services or the Mac Mini in the case of OpenClaw’s recent meteoric growth) suddenly see rising demand because they pair well with the new capability. Other companies look for ways to add integrations that make the new tool easier to plug into existing systems.
At this stage, the story shifts from a single product to an emerging ecosystem that amplifies its reach.
Phase 5: The Backlash from the Pioneers
Then a familiar turn arrives.
Some early adopters start getting bored and even a little disillusioned. Others start pointing out limitations, rough edges, and frustrations that were overlooked during their initial excitement. Sometimes they simply move on to the next shiny thing. Other times, sustained use reveals real constraints that only time can expose.
Ironically, the quieter second wave adopters are just beginning to feel comfortable. Enthusiasm and skepticism overlap in the marketplace.
Phase 6: Corporations Hit the Brakes
Meanwhile, large organizations watch from the sidelines while asking serious questions about security, governance, and risk. They focus on oversight, accountability, and long-term stability.
From a leadership perspective, this cautious approach seems safe. They can’t risk the family jewels on a promise of something amazing. At least, not yet.
Phase 7: The Safe Version Arrives
If the capability truly matters and maintains momentum, a major platform provider such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, (and nowadays) OpenAI, or Anthropic eventually releases something comparable inside their own infrastructure.
This can happen through acquisition, partnership, or independent development. When it does, the risk profile shifts almost overnight.
What once felt experimental and dangerous now feels enterprise-ready. It’s the signal that many CIOs and CISOs were waiting for.
Phase 8: The Irony of Timing
By the time most corporations adopt the new “safer version” of the capability, the original pioneers have already moved on.
They’re chasing the next breakthrough and speaking about the earlier tool as if it belongs to another era. Six months earlier it felt magical. Now it feels ordinary, in part because that earlier innovation did its job of pushing the frontier outward.
What This Means for Leaders
For leaders who care about both capability and security, sprinting toward the bleeding edge rarely makes sense.
Waiting for stability, clear governance, and trusted integration usually serves organizations better. In practice, that means allowing major, “trusted” platforms to bring new capabilities inside their own secure environments before moving at scale.
At the same time, leaders can’t afford to look inward only. Something important is always unfolding beyond the walls of their organization. Entrepreneurs are experimenting. Startups are forming. New approaches and new possibilities are taking shape. If a company becomes too passive or too comfortable, it risks being outpaced rather than protected.
The real leadership challenge is learning to tell the difference between waves that will reshape an industry and those that will fade.
Some signs of staying power are multiple independent developers building on top of a new technology, respected technologists moving beyond flashy demos into real production use cases, and serious enterprise concerns about security and governance being addressed rather than dismissed.
We don’t need to chase every new wave.
The real test is recognizing the waves that matter before they feel safe enough to bring inside our organization.
Photo by Nat on Unsplash – Innovation is easy to see. Truth is harder to judge.
Grandpa Bob Encouraging Leadership 
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