Americans have increasingly incorporated artificial intelligence into their work lives, according to a Gallup Workforce survey, which found 12% of employed adults say they use AI daily on the job.
The survey, conducted in the fall among more than 22,000 workers, found that roughly one-quarter of employed adults say they use AI at least frequently, which Gallup defined as using AI at least a few times a week. Nearly half of workers said they use AI at least a few times a year. Gallup also reported that 21% were using AI at least occasionally in 2023, when Gallup began asking the question, and the AP said the results point to the impact of the commercial boom sparked by ChatGPT for generative AI tools that can write emails and computer code, summarize long documents, create images, or help answer questions.
The AP said the share of Americans using AI at work could be starting to plateau after an explosive increase between 2024 and 2025. It described AI adoption through examples in multiple industries, including retail, finance, and education.
Gene Walinski, a 70-year-old Home Depot store associate in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, said he turns to an AI assistant on his personal phone about every hour on his shift so he can better answer questions about supplies he is not “100% familiar with” in the store’s electrical department. Walinski said, “I think my job would suffer if I couldn’t because there would be a lot of shrugged shoulders and ‘I don’t know’ and customers don’t want to hear that.”
The AP said AI adoption remains higher in technology-related fields, where it reported about 6 in 10 technology workers use AI frequently and about 3 in 10 use it daily. In finance, it highlighted Andrea Tanzi, a 28-year-old investment banker in New York who works for Bank of America, who said he uses AI tools every day to synthesize documents and data sets that would otherwise take him several hours to review. Tanzi also said he uses the bank’s internal AI chatbot, Erica, to help with administrative tasks.
The survey also found higher levels of at-least-yearly AI use among some non-technology roles, the AP said, including people in professional services, at colleges or universities, and in K-12 education. Joyce Hatzidakis, 60, a high school art teacher in Riverside, California, said she started experimenting with AI chatbots to help “clean up” her communications with parents. She said, “I can scribble out a note and not worry about what I say and then tell it what tone I want,” adding that when she rereads the messages, she can have them edited again and that she is “definitely getting less parent complaints.”
Hatzidakis said she started with ChatGPT and switched to Google’s Gemini when her school district made it its official tool. She said she has even used Gemini to help with recommendation letters, saying, “there’s only so many ways to say a kid is really creative.”
A Gallup Workforce survey from the previous year, the AP reported, found that about 6 in 10 employees using AI rely on chatbots or virtual assistance, while about 4 in 10 AI users said they use AI to consolidate information or data, to generate ideas, or to learn new things.
The AP also discussed potential upsides and risks tied to workplaces adopting AI tools, including the question of how much productivity gains might materialize and how AI could affect employment prospects. Sam Manning, a fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI and co-author of papers on AI job effects for the Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research, said workers most highly exposed to AI have traits that make them adaptable. He said they typically have higher levels of education, wider ranges of skill sets that can be applied to different jobs, and higher savings, which he said can help with weathering an income shock if someone loses a job.
Manning said his research identified some 6.1 million workers in the United States who are both heavily exposed to AI and less equipped to adapt. He said many are in administrative and clerical work, about 86% are women, and they are older and concentrated in smaller cities such as university towns or state capitals, which he said comes with fewer options to shift careers. He said automated skills can mean less transferable experience for other jobs and lower savings, and he added that “An income shock could be much more harmful or difficult to manage.”
Despite the rising adoption rate, the AP said a separate Gallup Workforce survey in 2025 found that few employees said they were “very” or “somewhat” likely that new technology, automation, robots or AI would eliminate their job within the next five years. The AP reported that half said it was “not at all likely,” though that share decreased from about 6 in 10 in 2023.
Not everyone expressed concern about job loss. The AP cited Rev. Michael Bingham, pastor of the Faith Community Methodist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, who said he would never ask a “soulless” machine to help write his sermons, relying instead on “the power of God” to help guide him through ideas. Bingham said, “You don’t want a machine, you want a human being, to hold your hand if you’re dying,” and “you want to know that your loved one was able to hold the hand of a loving human being who cared for them.”
The AP reported that reported AI usage was less common in service-based sectors such as retail, health care or manufacturing. It said Home Depot did not ask Walinski to use AI when he got the job last year, and that he is “not at all worried” that AI will replace him. Walinski said, “The human interface part is really what a store like mine works on,” and “It’s all about the people.”
Gallup said its quarterly workforce surveys were conducted with a random sample of adults age 18 and older who work full time and part time for organizations in the United States and are members of Gallup’s probability-based Gallup Panel. It said the most recent survey of 22,368 employed U.S. adults was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 13, 2025, and that the margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 1 percentage point.