In a new survey released Thursday, a nonprofit AI research center found that half of U.S. adults have used AI in the past week, either for personal or professional purposes, with 20% of full-time workers saying AI has taken over some part of their job.
The survey, conducted by Ipsos in partnership with Epoch AI – a leading nonprofit focused on data-driven research on the development and impact of artificial intelligence – asked 2,000 U.S. adults about how and when they use AI. Even though the survey found that AI was replacing some tasks at work, 15% of full-time workers reported starting to do new tasks at work that they wouldn’t have done without AI services, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5%.
Caroline Falkman Olsson, who helped lead the Epoch AI research, said the findings confirmed broad hypotheses about AI’s growing impact in the workplace. “When we actually look at what people report about their use of AI, we see augmentation and automation effects,” Olsson told NBC News, cautioning that more granular research is needed to understand the exact tasks that are affected. “But we need to understand how workplaces and people’s actual tasks are changing.”
Epoch AI was founded in 2021 as a volunteer effort to collect and analyze data on AI development trends. Since the research center gained attention in 2022 by studying the amount of computing power used by leading AI companies to train their models, Epoch AI has expanded to study the price 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 carried out from March 3 to 5 via the Ipsos online survey platform. Among adults who used AI in the past week, the study found that nearly 50% used AI between two and five days per week. However, the survey also showed that most people (62.5%) only completed one to two quick tasks using AI on their heaviest usage day, in contrast to the roughly 6% of respondents who used AI heavily.
Nicholas Miailhe, an AI policy leader and expert at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, an international AI initiative involving 46 countries and the European Union, said the findings should be a wake-up call to workers and policymakers. “When 1 in 5 workers say AI is already replacing part of their job, we can start talking about a restructuring of the labor market in real time,” he told NBC News.
“The fact that replacement appears to be outpacing augmentation should get our attention: the policy window for shaping how AI transforms work is probably closing faster than most governments realize. »
The survey also found that about half of U.S. adults who used AI for work in the past week only used their own personal subscriptions or free versions of AI services, instead of subscriptions purchased at their workplace.
Additionally, the survey focused on the growing use of AI agents, or AI systems capable of performing independent tasks. The survey finds that overall agent utilization rates are still low, even though the technology has only gained industry attention in recent months. Eight percent (plus or minus 1.5%) of AI users hired an AI agent in the past week, compared to 49% (plus or minus 1.6%) of AI users using AI systems to search the web.
Renan Araujo, director of programs at the nonprofit Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, said the agent’s results were remarkable: “One in 12 Americans have used an autonomous AI agent, software that not only answers questions but takes action on your behalf,” Araujo told NBC News. “This feature wasn’t available two years ago, and it’s amazing to see its usage growing so quickly. »
The Epoch poll also looked at how American adults were using AI. The survey found that many adults who used AI in the past week used the services to search for information or recommendations (80%), write or edit text (59%), and brainstorm ideas (53%).
In a sample of approximately 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 investigation follows new reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley addressing the growing specter of AI in the job market.
Goldman Sachs Economists published new findings this week that AI eliminates approximately 16,000 jobs per month when accounting for both automation and AI-driven augmentation. THE bank researchers previously estimated in March, AI can potentially automate tasks that consume around 25% of all work hours.
