Employee AI Use Rises, but Awareness of Organizational Strategy Still Lags

Employee AI Use Rises, but Awareness of Organizational Strategy Still Lags

Key Takeaways

• Gallup finds 45% of U.S. employees used AI at work at least a few times a year in Q3 2024, up from 40% the prior quarter.
• Knowledge workers far outpace frontline roles in AI use, with tech and professional services leading adoption.
• Nearly a quarter of employees don’t know whether their organization has implemented AI, highlighting a persistent communication gap.

Gallup’s latest workforce data shows AI use creeping deeper into the American workplace, though not always in ways organizations are tracking or communicating. The firm’s nationally representative survey of 23,068 employed adults—conducted online Aug. 5–19 via the Gallup Panel—confirms a trend many leaders sense anecdotally: employees are increasingly experimenting with and relying on AI tools, even if their companies’ formal strategies remain fuzzy to them.

The headline numbers are straightforward enough. The percentage of U.S. employees who used AI at work at least a few times a year climbed from 40% in Q2 to 45% in Q3. More frequent use is also rising: those using AI a few times a week or more jumped from 19% to 23%. Daily use nudged upward too, from 8% to 10%. It is a small shift, but it’s the sort of movement that tends to accumulate quarter over quarter.

Still, there is a catch. The people turning to AI most often are concentrated in specific kinds of roles. Employees working in knowledge-based jobs—technology, information systems, finance, professional services—report the highest levels of use. Seventy-six percent of employees in technology or information systems say they use AI in their role a few times a year or more. In finance, that figure is 58%, and in professional services, 57%. Drop into frontline-heavy industries, however, and adoption looks markedly different: retail sits at 33%, healthcare at 37%, and manufacturing at 38%.

That gap isn’t new, but it is getting harder for business leaders to ignore because it directly affects how equitably AI-driven gains spread across teams. And yet, the Gallup numbers suggest many organizations haven’t connected the dots for their people. Only 37% of employees said their organization has implemented AI technology to improve productivity, efficiency, and quality. Forty percent said their organization had not. Twenty-three percent—nearly one in four—said they simply didn’t know.

That last statistic deserves scrutiny. It is lower than the share of employees who reported using AI at least a few times in the past year, but higher than the share who reported using it frequently. This implies some employees are using AI tools without knowing whether those tools align with—or are even acknowledged by—their organization’s AI strategy. You could call it a shadow adoption layer, though that might be putting too much spin on what is mostly a basic communication issue.

The survey also reveals where uncertainty tends to collect. Employees in individual contributor roles (26%) were more likely than managers (16%) and leaders (7%) to say they don’t know whether their organization has implemented AI. Part-time employees, on‑site workers, and employees in frontline roles also reported higher uncertainty. None of this is particularly shocking; people farther from decision‑making generally know less about how decisions get made. But it does raise a practical question: how do you expect employees to adopt AI meaningfully if they remain unclear on whether their company endorses it?

A small methodological aside—and it is worth the tangent because it clarifies the trends. Earlier versions of Gallup’s survey didn’t offer a “don’t know” option regarding implementation, effectively nudging respondents to guess. Under that format, the share of employees who believed their organization had implemented AI appeared to rise sharply year-over-year. Once Gallup added the “don’t know” option, the distribution changed, offering a more realistic view of the landscape. The fact that 23% chose “don’t know” this time around tells you a lot about how uneven information flow remains.

As for how employees use AI, the patterns haven’t shifted much since Gallup began measuring them. Among employees who use AI at least yearly, 42% say they use it to consolidate information, 41% to generate ideas, and 36% to learn new things. This set of uses feels foundational—the first things most workers try when AI tools appear in their workflow. Interestingly, this usage mix has been relatively stable since early 2024.

When employees were asked what types of AI tools they use, more than six in 10 pointed to chatbots or virtual assistants. AI writing and editing tools came next at 36%, followed by coding assistants at 14%. More advanced tools—data science, analytics, specialized coding—remain niche, though not everywhere. Frequent AI users reported significantly higher usage of these tools than their less‑frequent counterparts, with the biggest gaps in coding assistants and data analytics. If there is a pipeline of deeper technical adoption, it likely runs through these power users.

Gallup’s broader findings underscore something many organizations are quietly wrestling with: AI use is growing, but not evenly, and not always in line with organizational design. Forty-five percent of employees say they use AI at least a few times a year, yet daily use is still limited to about 10% of the workforce. Adoption is highest in certain roles and industries. Perhaps most importantly, broader use correlates with greater managerial support and clear strategic integration.

For B2B leaders, this last point is likely the hinge. AI isn’t merely drifting into workplaces; it is threading itself into employee habits. But without clear signals from leadership—training, endorsement, defined use cases—that adoption risks becoming fragmented. Even so, the findings hint at an opportunity: with better communication and managerial involvement, organizations could help employees move from occasional experimentation to confident, productive use.

And maybe that is the real story here: employees are moving, steadily, toward AI-enabled work. The question is whether their organizations will meet them there.