CONCEPT
Innovation-Decision Process
Rogers's five-stage sequence through which an individual (or organization) moves from first knowledge of an innovation to full adoption: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, confirmation.
The innovation-decision process is Rogers's model of how individuals actually decide whether to adopt or reject an innovation. The process unfolds in five stages: knowledge (the adopter becomes aware of the innovation's existence and gains some understanding of how it functions), persuasion (the adopter forms a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward it), decision (the adopter engages in activities that lead to a choice to adopt or reject), implementation (the adopter puts the innovation into use), and confirmation (the adopter seeks reinforcement for the decision already made, and may reverse it if exposed to conflicting messages). Each stage has distinct communication requirements and characteristic challenges. The AI transition has compressed these stages into near-simultaneity in ways that strain the framework.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Rogers emphasized that the stages are not always cleanly separable and that individuals can move backward through them. The model is an analytical heuristic, not a rigid sequence. But the heuristic is useful because the stages have different dominant dynamics: knowledge stage depends on