Half Of Employed Ai Users Now Use It For Work

A survey run by Epoch AI with Ipsos in March 2026 found that among employed Americans who had used AI in the past week, half used it at least as much for work as for personal tasks; the other half used it mainly for personal things (epoch.ai). The poll of 2,021 U.S. adults was fielded March 3-5 on Ipsos's KnowledgePanel, a probability-based panel recruited through address-based sampling, which reduces self-selection bias, and results are weighted to Census benchmarks. Half of all respondents had used an AI tool in the past week. The authors, Caroline Falkman Olsson and Yafah Edelman, note that Pew reported in October 2025 that roughly one in five U.S. workers used AI on the job, a figure they say is not directly comparable but points the same way.

The survey also asked whether AI had changed what people do at work. Among those using it at least as much for work as for personal tasks, 27% said it had replaced some of their existing tasks, such as summarizing a document they would otherwise read, and most of them had not taken on new AI-enabled tasks. 21% said they had started doing new tasks because of AI, such as data analysis that would otherwise require coding, and nearly half of that group had not lost any existing tasks. The authors stress that they did not collect examples of specific tasks.

The biggest gap was by how people pay. Among employed AI users, 38% of free-tier users used AI at least as much for work as for personal tasks, compared with 58% of people paying for their own subscription and 76% of those whose employer paid. The authors say they cannot tell which way this runs: employers may drive adoption by handing out paid tools, as Microsoft Copilot's bundling with Microsoft 365 suggests, or workers may seek paid access after hitting free-tier limits.