There’s a good chance your boss is using AI more than you.
Leaders are adopting AI at nearly double the rate of individual contributors, a new Gallup poll released Monday indicates. The survey found that 33% of leaders, or those who identified as “managers of managers,” use AI frequently, meaning a few times a week or more, compared to 16% of individual contributors.
Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, Jim Harter, told Business Insider that leaders are likely feeling added pressure to think about AI and how it can increase efficiency and effectiveness.
“There’s probably more leaders experimenting with it because they see the urgency and they see it as a competitive threat potentially,” Harter said.
The data point was one of several findings from Gallup’s survey on AI adoption in the workplace, including:
- The number of US employees who use AI at work at least a few times a year has increased from 21% to 40% in the past two years
- Frequent AI use increased from 11% to 19% since 2023
- Daily use of AI doubled in the past year from 4% to 8%
- 15% of employees surveyed said it was “very or somewhat likely that automation, robots, or AI” would eliminate their jobs in a five-year period
- 44% of employees said their company has started to integrate AI, but only 22% say their company shared a plan or strategy
- 30% of employees said their company has “general guidelines or formal policies” in place for using AI at work
- 16% of the employees who use AI “strongly agree” that AI tools provided by their company are helpful for their job
While AI adoption has increased overall in the last two years, that increase isn’t evenly distributed across industries. The Gallup report said that AI adoption “increased primarily for white-collar roles,” with 27% surveyed now saying they use AI frequently on the job, a 12% increase from last year.
Among white-collar workers, frequent AI is most common in the tech industry, at 50%, according to the survey, followed by professional services at 34%, and finance at 32%. Meanwhile, frequent AI use among production and front-line workers has dropped from 11% in 2023 to 9% this year, according to Gallup’s polling.
Concerns that AI will eliminate jobs have also not increased overall in the last two years, but the report indicated that employees in industries like technology, retail, and finance are more likely than others to believe AI will one day take their jobs.
The most common challenge with AI adoption, according to those surveyed, is “unclear use case or value proposition,” suggesting that companies may not providing clear guidance.
The report said that when employees say they “strongly agree” that leadership has shared a clear plan for using AI, they’re three times as likely to feel “very prepared to work with AI” and 2.6 times as likely to feel comfortable using it at work.
“In some cases, you’ve got to have the training to be able to use AI as a complement with other text analytic tools that are more precise,” Gallup’s Harter told BI.
Harter said that while organizations are increasingly developing plans around AI usage, “there’s still a long way to go,” and it may not be a one-and-done approach.
“They’re going to have to continue to be trained in how to use it because it’s going to evolve itself,” Harter said.
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