Consumers bought the smart home. Most never turned it on. This is the first cross-brand research program built to find out why, and to measure it, wave after wave.
The connected home has never been better equipped. It has also never been less used. Manufacturers spent a decade building smart connectivity into refrigerators, ranges, washers and dishwashers. Consumers spent that same decade largely ignoring it.There is no shortage of smart appliances on the market. There is a shortage of proof that anyone is using them, and no independent benchmark that tells a manufacturer how it stacks up against competitors on that single, business-critical question.
of smart appliance owners have never opened the companion app.
estimated to activate zero smart features after purchase.
The industry’s response has been to redesign the app: simplify onboarding, reduce the taps, quiet the notifications. It hasn’t moved the needle. That gap between investment and impact is exactly what this program was built to explain.
For years the industry’s answer has been the same: activation is low because the apps are hard to use. Our research points to a different explanation: one grounded in when people act, not just how easy it is to act.A high energy bill. A new baby. A new home. A fridge full of spoiled food. These triggering moments, not app redesigns, are what turn a smart appliance owner into an actual smart appliance user.
Apps are too complex, onboarding is cumbersome, notifications are excessive. Fix the interface, fix the gap.
UX friction is real but incomplete. Even a well-designed app won’t get opened without a personal reason to open it.
Most households activate fewer than 40% of available features; an estimated 34% activate none.
UX friction and personal life context work together; a life event supplies the motivation to push through friction.
Activation rates and friction points differ meaningfully across refrigerators, cooking, laundry and dishwashers.
One person typically drives the large majority of activations and shapes the whole household's engagement.
A two-phase sequential design: qualitative depth first, then quantitative scale, so the survey measures the constructs that actually matter, not just the ones that are easy to ask about.
Not every non-user is the same kind of non-user. The research maps the full spectrum, from zero engagement to full optimisation, and identifies the single household member most likely to drive, or block, adoption for everyone else.
Segment sizes are hypothesis-driven projections, to be validated and nationally sized through primary survey fieldwork.
A refrigerator and a dishwasher fail to activate for entirely different psychological reasons. Category-specific friction requires category-specific strategy.
Every wave is packaged to be used, not read once and filed away.
Key qualitative themes, trigger-event categories and a friction typology from the interview phase.
Complete cross-tabulated data by appliance category, demographics and consumer segment.
Category and feature-level activation rates, plus AGI scores by brand.
Validated five-segment profiles with trigger maps and intervention strategies.
Ranked value-proposition framing, tested for appeal and believability.
Short-form articles and social hooks, released after the primary-buyer exclusivity window.
Complete synthesis with strategic implications, built to walk into a leadership meeting.
This isn't a one-time report. It's the first wave of a continuous, five-year intelligence program: quarterly pulse tracking, annual deep-dive modules and a live benchmarking dashboard that gets more valuable with every wave.
The first independent, cross-brand baseline for smart appliance activation.
Direction of travel: what moved, what didn't, and which interventions worked.
Something competitors can't replicate, because they don't have the data.
Future modules extend the same core question into brand perception, in-home behavioural observation and pricing elasticity, so the program grows with the questions the industry hasn’t asked yet.
Benchmark activation against competitors and see exactly where product and platform investment is paying off.
Understand return rates, in-store education gaps and shelf strategy for connected SKUs.
Act on the single biggest activation trigger in the data, the energy bill, with a direct commercial stake in the findings.
Fielding is underway now, across a disciplined sixteen-week program, including a deliberate two-week gap before the national survey launches, to make sure it measures the right constructs.
Five reasons this benchmark can only be built here.
The base study is fielding now. Subscriber access to the full AGI benchmark, segment data and quarterly tracking is limited to early partners.