Hiring American workers artificial intelligence Entering work life at an astonishing pace in the past few years, According to a new poll.
According to one study, approximately 12% of employed adults say they use AI at work every day. Gallup Employee Survey It was conducted this fall among more than 22,000 U.S. workers.
According to the survey, nearly a quarter say they use AI at least frequently (defined as at least a few times a week), and nearly half say they use AI at least a few times a year. This compares to the 21% who were using AI at least sometimes in 2023, when Gallup started asking this question, indicating the impact of the broader commercial boom in generative AI tools that can create emails, sparked by ChatGPT. and computer codeyou can summarize long documents, create images, and answer questions.
Gene Walinsky, a Home Depot clerk, is one of the employees adopting AI in the workplace. The 70-year-old relies on an AI assistant on his personal phone nearly every hour during his shift to help him better answer questions about supplies he’s “not 100% familiar with” in the electrical department of his New Smyrna Beach, Fla., store.
“If I can’t do that, I think it’s going to hurt my job, because there’s going to be a lot of people who just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘I don’t know,’ and customers don’t want to hear that,” Walinsky said.
AI is being used in many areas of technology, finance, and education
While more and more employees are using AI frequently, adoption rates remain high among employees working in technology-related fields.
About 6 in 10 technology workers say they use AI frequently, and about 3 in 10 say they use it daily.
Although the percentage of Americans working in technology who say they use AI daily or regularly has increased significantly since 2023, there are signs that AI adoption may explode after 2024-2025 before starting to plateau.
In the financial industry, another area where AI adoption is increasing, Andrea Tanzi, a 28-year-old investment banker, said she uses AI tools every day to integrate documents and data sets that would normally take hours to review.
Tanzi, who works at Bank of America in New York, said the bank also uses the bank’s internal AI chatbot, Erica, to assist with administrative tasks.
Additionally, the majority of those working in professional services, colleges and universities, and K-12 education say they use AI at least a few times a year.
Joyce Hadjidakis, 60, a high school art teacher in Riverside, California, started experimenting with an AI chatbot to “organize” communication with parents.
“Written notes allow you to convey the tone you want without worrying about what you say,” she said. “Then you can read it over and if it’s not correct, you can have it edited again. We’ve definitely seen fewer complaints from parents.”
Another Gallup Workforce study last year found that about 6 in 10 employees using AI rely on chatbots or virtual assistance when using AI tools. About 4 in 10 AI users in the workplace report using AI to integrate information and data, generate ideas, and learn new things.
Hatzidakis started using ChatGPT, but switched to Google’s Gemini when the district made it an official tool. She even used it to write letters of recommendation because “there are limited ways to tell if a child is truly creative.”
Advantages and disadvantages of introducing AI
The AI industry and the U.S. government are strongly promoting the adoption of AI in the workplace and schools. More people and organizations will need to purchase these tools to justify the huge investment in building and operating them. Energy-intensive AI computing system. But not all economists agree on the extent to which it affects productivity growth and employment prospects.
“Most of the workers most exposed to AI have highly adaptable characteristics, making it likely that their workflows will be disrupted by AI, for better or for worse,” said Sam Manning, research fellow at the Center for AI Governance and co-author of AI. new paper The Brookings Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research on the employment impact of AI.
Workers in primarily computer-based jobs that make heavy use of AI “typically have higher education levels, broader skill sets that can be applied to a variety of jobs, and greater savings, which can help them weather the income shock of job loss,” Manning said.
Meanwhile, Manning’s research found that approximately 6.1 million U.S. workers have been highly exposed to AI and are less able to adapt. Many of them work in managerial or clerical positions, approximately 86% are women, are older, and are concentrated in small cities such as university towns and state capitals, with few options for changing jobs.
“As skills are automated, there are fewer transferable skills and fewer savings, if any at all,” Manning says. “Income shocks may be even more harmful or difficult to manage.”
Few workers are worried about AI replacing them
Another Gallup Workforce survey conducted in 2025 found that despite the increased use of AI, few workers say it is “very” or “somewhat likely” that new technology, automation, robots, or AI will eliminate their jobs within the next five years. Half of them said there was “no chance of that happening at all,” down from about 6 out of 10 in 2023.
The Rev. Michael Bingham, pastor of Faith Community Methodist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, isn’t worried about losing his job.
When asked about the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury, the chatbot replied, “Gibberish,” but Bingham said he would not ask a “soulless” machine to write his sermons, instead relying on the “power of God” to guide his ideas.
“I don’t want a machine, I want a human being to hold my hand when I’m about to die,” Bingham said. “And you want to know that your loved one was able to hold the hand of a loving human being who cared about them.”
The reported use of AI is less common in service-based sectors such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Home Depot didn’t ask Walinski, who spent decades in the auto industry, to use AI when he started at the store last year. But the home improvement giant isn’t stopping him, and has “no worries” about AI replacing him.
“What stores like mine are really working on is the human interface part,” Walinski said. “It’s all about people.”
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Mr. O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island, and Mr. Sanders from Washington.
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Gallup’s Quarterly Employee Survey was conducted among a random sample of adults 18 years 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. The latest survey of 22,368 employed U.S. adults was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 30. 13th, 2025. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 1 percentage point.
