According to a new study published on Thursday by a nonprofit AI research center, half of American adults utilized AI in the previous week, either for personal or professional purposes, and 20% of full-time employees said that AI has partially replaced their jobs.
The study, performed by Ipsos in collaboration with Epoch AI, a prominent charity focused on data-driven research into the development and impact of artificial intelligence, polled 2,000 American adults about how and when they use it. While the poll discovered that AI replaced some jobs at work, 15% of full-time employees claimed they had begun doing additional tasks at work that they would not have done without AI services, with a plus or minus 2.5% margin of error.
According to Caroline Falkman Olsson, who assisted in spearheading the research for Epoch AI, the findings supported general hypotheses on AI’s increasing influence in the workplace. Olsson told, “When we actually look at what people report for their AI usage, we do see augmentation and automation effects,” but he warned that more detailed research is needed to pinpoint the precise jobs that are being affected. “However, we must determine how people’s real workplaces and tasks are evolving.”
In order to collect and examine data regarding patterns in AI development, Epoch AI was established in 2021 as a volunteer project. Epoch AI has grown to investigate the cost of AI services, the building of data centers worldwide, and the kinds of chips used to create AI models since the research center attracted notice in 2022 by examining the amount of processing power top AI companies used to train their models.
The most recent survey was carried out using Ipsos’ internet polling platform from March 3 to 5. According to the study, nearly half of those who used AI in the previous week did so two to five days a week. In contrast to the about 6% of respondents who used AI extensively, the poll also revealed that the majority of respondents (62.5%) only completed one or two quick tasks using AI on their most intense day of AI usage.
The findings should serve as a wake-up call for workers and policymakers, according to Nicholas Miailhe, an AI policy leader and specialist at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, an international AI project made up of 46 nations and the European Union. He told, “We can start talking about labor market restructuring happening in real time when 1 in 5 workers say AI is already replacing parts of their job.”
The policy window to determine how AI alters work is likely closing quicker than most governments think, as evidenced by the fact that replacement appears to be exceeding augmentation.
The survey also discovered that about half of American individuals who used AI for work in the previous week exclusively used personal subscriptions or free versions of AI services, rather than subscriptions purchased by their company.
The poll also discussed the increasing use of AI agents, which are autonomous AI systems. Although the technology has just recently attracted significant industry attention, the survey revealed that overall agent utilization rates are still low. While 49% (plus or minus 1.6%) of AI users used AI systems for web searches, just 8% (plus or minus 1.5%) of AI users had interacted with an AI agent in the previous week.
The agent results were noteworthy, according to Renan Araujo, head of programs at the nonprofit Institute for AI Policy and Strategy: According to Araujo, one in twelve Americans has used an autonomous AI agent, which is software that does more than just respond to inquiries but also acts on your behalf. Two years ago, this feature was unavailable, and the rapid growth in its use is impressive.
The Epoch survey also looked at adult Americans’ use of AI. According to the survey, 80% of respondents who used AI in the previous week did so to find information or recommendations, 59% to create or edit text, and 53% to generate ideas.
ChatGPT was the most popular AI service (used by 31% of the sample of almost 2,000 adults), followed by Microsoft’s Copilot (10.5%) and Google’s Gemini (21%).
Epoch’s poll follows fresh analyses of the potential threat of AI in the labor market from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
This week, Goldman Sachs economists released new research showing that, when automation and augmentation brought on by AI are taken into consideration, AI is eliminating almost 16,000 jobs every month. In March, the bank’s analysts calculated that AI might be able to automate tasks that take up around 25% of all labor hours.
