U.S. adults report using artificial intelligence most often to search for information, according to a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that also shows how sharply AI use varies by age and by the type of task. The survey found that 60% of Americans use AI to find information at least some of the time, with the share jumping to 74% among adults under 30. At the same time, the poll found that only about 4 in 10 Americans say they have used AI for work tasks or to come up with ideas—suggesting that the technology’s promised productivity gains have not broadly reshaped many workplaces yet.
The survey results point to both an overall increase in familiarity and to limits in how people rely on AI. The poll presented eight different ways Americans said they had interacted with AI, and searching for information was described as the most common use. The findings also highlight that some AI-driven search outputs may not be obvious to users, such as when answers appear within search results rather than in clearly labeled chat interfaces.
The AP-NORC poll also found that younger adults are more likely than older adults to rely on AI for brainstorming and for work-adjacent tasks. It reported a particularly large age divide on brainstorming: about 6 in 10 adults under 30 have used AI for coming up with ideas, compared with only 2 in 10 among adults age 60 or older. The poll further reported that young adults are more likely to use AI for coming up with ideas at least “daily,” while older adults appear to use it far less often for that purpose.
Examples from respondents underscored the mixed pattern of enthusiastic use for some day-to-day decisions and restraint for others. Courtney Thayer, a 34-year-old audiologist in Des Moines, Iowa, said she uses ChatGPT to generate ideas for meal planning, while also using it to calculate nutritional values for a recipe she has baked for years. She described asking the tool to “make a meal prep for the week, then to add an Asian flair,” and said, “It wasn’t the most flavorful thing I’ve ever had in my life, but it’s a nice stepping off point.” She added that she uses AI for portioning and waste reduction, saying she uses it “for the amount so that I’m not over-serving myself and ending up with wasted food.”
Thayer said she also uses AI at work, in part because hearing-aid technology includes AI and because it helps her draft professional emails more quickly. But she said she avoids AI for important information, particularly medical advice, after experiencing what she described as chatbots “hallucinat[ing]” false information about topics she has studied for years.
On the question of how AI fits into work and other practical activities, the poll reported that roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they use AI for work tasks at least sometimes. About one-third of respondents said they use AI for helping to write emails, create or edit images, or use it for entertainment, and about one-quarter said they use AI to shop. The poll described search for information as the most common use among the eight options and suggested that even those numbers may understate how often AI is involved in how people encounter information online.
The poll’s findings also suggested that AI use varies not only by task but by how people relate to it socially. Just under 2 in 10 adults overall—about the same share as “just under 2 in 10”—said they have used AI for companionship, with about a quarter of those under 30 reporting similar use. The report described respondents who said they have little interest in AI companions, including Sanaa Wilson, a freelance data scientist in the Los Angeles area, who said she has no interest in that kind of use.
Wilson said she does pay attention to when AI is involved in online answers, but she tends to avoid the most general AI-generated search summaries unless the question is simple. She described skipping ahead past AI-generated responses that come with search results, saying, “It has to be a basic question like, ‘What day does Christmas land on in 2025?’” She said, “I’ll be like, ‘That makes sense. I trust it.’” But she said that when results get into specific news—such as what is happening in California or connected to the education system—she scrolls further down.
The poll was conducted July 10-14 among 1,437 adults, using a probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points for adults overall.