In Gallup’s survey of U.S. employees, 28% said they used AI at work daily or weekly, while 54% said they had not used it in their role. Workers who had used AI often reported faster work and other benefits, but those answers are self-assessments, not proof that AI caused wider workplace changes or independently measured productivity gains. Gallup’s findings, summarized by Semafor, offer a view of what employees reported—not a measure of AI use across every workplace.
Gallup published the first results from the second year of the American Job Quality Study on Monday, Oct. 5. The project is a partnership between Gallup, Jobs for the Future and The Families & Workers Fund, and examines job quality as well as workplace AI use. The reported findings come from one survey, not a collection of separately conducted polls.
The survey ran from Jan. 26 to March 24, 2026. Gallup used responses from 15,482 U.S. employees for broader comparisons of AI use and job quality. A separate group of 7,845 employees who said they had used AI in their job at least a few times in the past year answered questions about its effects on their work.
That distinction matters: the 28% and 54% figures describe the broader employee sample, while the reported benefits come from the group with recent experience using AI. The figures do not show how often AI is used across every task, organization or kind of job, and they are not counts taken from workplace software logs.
What did workers say AI changes about their work?
Among employees who had used AI at work, 63% said it helped them work faster. Another 56% said it helped them find more creative solutions, 47% said it gave them more time for the most interesting parts of their jobs, and 46% said it helped them produce higher-quality work.
These percentages reflect respondents’ views of their own work. They are not independent measurements of task completion, creativity or quality. Gallup also said employers might assess AI’s effects differently, so the results do not establish whether workers’ reported gains show up in company performance data.
Some respondents also connected AI use with changes in their responsibilities. Overall, 31% of AI users said their use had led their employer to ask them to take on more responsibilities. Among users who said AI helped them work faster, 37% reported being asked to take on more.
Those answers record workers’ perceptions of a link between AI use and added responsibilities. They do not establish that AI caused employers to change job duties, or that the additional responsibilities changed workloads overall or affected pay.
Reported benefits also varied by monthly income from respondents’ main jobs. Among AI users, 70% of those earning $10,000 or more said AI helped them work faster. That figure was 62% for those earning $4,000 to $9,999 and 58% for those earning less than $4,000.
The differences describe survey responses, not proof that higher pay makes AI more effective or that AI created income gaps. The findings do not explain why respondents in the income groups answered differently.
Who reports using AI at work?
Gallup defined regular use as daily or weekly. By that measure, 40% of college graduates reported regular use, compared with 17% of employees without a college degree. Managers were also more likely than individual contributors to report regular use: 37% compared with 25%.
Free newsletter
Get the morning briefing
Start each day with the AI stories that matter and why — a short, free email from our newsroom.
The survey shows that reported use differs across these groups, but does not establish why. Job duties, access to tools, individual choices or other factors could be relevant; the findings do not isolate their effects. Gallup says use varies by job and industry, and notes that some jobs offer fewer direct opportunities to use AI.
Industry results also differed. About half of employees in professional and business services, financial activities, and information and media reported regular use. In several frontline or production roles, 70% to more than 80% said they had never used AI at work.
These are employees’ reports, not an audit of which employers provide AI tools or a count of actual usage. The overall percentages can therefore conceal differences between kinds of work. And reported frequency alone does not show whether AI has changed the quality or amount of work being done.
Gallup reported that regular use was more common among some workers who already tend to hold higher-quality jobs, and said further research is needed to understand the relationship between job quality and AI use. The survey documents an association in responses; it does not show that AI produced differences in job quality, education or pay.
What can this survey establish—and what remains unknown?
The findings show how surveyed employees described their AI use and, for those with recent experience, its perceived effects. Daily or weekly use was not the norm in the broader sample, while users most often identified speed and creative solutions as benefits. The survey cannot on its own establish how much time AI saved, whether output improved or whether employment changed as a result.
The October findings do not provide the full questionnaire, sampling and weighting details, response rate or margin of sampling error. Without that information, readers have limited grounds to assess how closely the respondents reflect U.S. employees overall or how precisely to interpret the percentages.
The results also do not establish that the same individuals were followed from the study’s first year into its second. They offer no direct measure of long-term changes in job quality, total employment or productivity. That makes the results useful as a report of workers’ experiences, but not as evidence that AI has caused broad changes in the workplace.
Gallup said the full second-year report was expected in late October. As of its Oct. 5 announcement, the report had not yet been published, and no additional findings from it were established.
