> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).

Surprising. I couldn't find the study they're citing, and they didn't include a link. Anecdotally, my friends across various industries (tech, finance, medicine, scientific research) are all using AI more heavily as time goes on.

Found the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877

I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.

The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).

The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?

It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.

That sentence links to https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/a...

Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:

> Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.

Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.

As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877 - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".

They surveyed ~24,000 people with the question "Do you use generative AI for your job?", then later asked which of the following tools they used:

ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly

After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...

Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.

I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.

Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.

ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.

It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.

The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.

The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.

Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode. It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.

Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.

That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.

I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.

I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.

If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?

The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:

> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.