Half of American adults have used AI for personal or professional purposes in the past week, and 20% of full-time workers say AI has taken some of their work away, according to a new survey released Thursday by the nonprofit AI Research Center.
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The poll, conducted by Ipsos in partnership with Epoch AI, a leading nonprofit organization focused on data-driven research on the development and impact of artificial intelligence, surveyed 2,000 American adults about when and how they use AI. While the survey found that some tasks in the workplace have been replaced by AI, 15% of full-time workers said they have started performing new tasks at work that they would not have been able to do without AI services (with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5%).
Caroline Folkman Olson, who helped lead the Epoch AI research, said the results support widespread assumptions about the growing influence of AI in the workplace. “When you really look at what people are reporting about their use of AI, we do see an effect of scale and automation,” Olson told NBC News, warning that more detailed research is needed to understand the exact tasks being affected. “But we need to understand how people’s actual workplaces and jobs are changing.”
Epoch AI was founded in 2021 as a volunteer effort to collect and analyze data on trends in AI development. Since the research center gained attention in 2022 for studying the amount of computing power that major AI companies use to train their models, Epoch AI has expanded to study the pricing of AI services, the construction of data centers around the world, and the types of chips used to develop AI models.
The latest survey was conducted from March 3 to 5 through Ipsos’ online voting platform. Among adults who have used AI in the past week, nearly 50% use it two to five days a week, the survey found. However, the study also showed that on the days when they used AI most intensively, most people (62.5%) performed only one or two simple tasks using AI, compared to about 6% of respondents who used AI frequently.
Nicolas Miailje, AI policy leader and expert at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, an international AI initiative made up of 46 countries and the European Union, said the results should be a wake-up call for workers and policymakers. “Once one in five workers says some part of their job has already been replaced by AI, then we can start talking about the restructuring of the labor market happening in real time,” he told NBC News.
“The fact that substitution appears to be outpacing augmentation should get our attention. The policy window for shaping how AI transforms work is probably closing sooner than most governments realize.”
The survey also found that nearly half of U.S. adults who used AI at work in the past week only used their personal subscription or free version of an AI service, rather than a subscription purchased at work.
The study also highlighted the increasing use of AI agents, or AI systems that can perform independent tasks. Although the technology has gained widespread industry traction in recent months, overall agent usage remains low, the study found. 8% (plus or minus 1.5%) of AI users used an AI agent in the past week, compared to 49% (plus or minus 1.6%) who used an AI system to conduct a web search.
Renan Araujo, program director at the nonprofit Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, said the agent findings are noteworthy. “One in 12 Americans uses an autonomous AI agent, which is software that not only answers questions but also performs actions on your behalf,” Araujo told NBC News. “This functionality wasn’t available two years ago, so it’s amazing how quickly its usage is growing.”
The Epoch poll also looked at how American adults use AI. The survey found that the majority of adults who used AI in the past week used the service to find information or recommendations (80%), create or edit text (59%), and brainstorm ideas (53%).
From a sample of nearly 2,000 adults, ChatGPT was the most popular AI service (used by 31%), followed by Google’s Gemini (21%) and Microsoft’s Copilot (10.5%).
Epoch’s research comes on the heels of a new report from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that addresses growing concerns about AI in the labor market.
Economists at Goldman Sachs released new research this week showing that AI eliminates about 16,000 jobs per month, considering both automation and augmentation. Researchers at the bank previously estimated in March that AI could automate tasks that consume about 25% of all working hours.
