Dive Brief:

• Generative artificial intelligence has spread throughout the U.S. workplace and across a broad range of professions since its debut less than two years ago, with 28% of workers now using the technology on the job, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Twenty-four percent of workers use generative AI at least once each week and one out of every nine turn to it daily, researchers said in what they call the first survey gauging the extent of the technology’s use in the U.S. workplace and home.
• “Generative AI adoption is most common in management, business and computer occupations, with usage rates exceeding 40%,” according to the researchers, including an economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Still, one in five ‘blue collar’ workers and one in five workers without a college degree use generative AI regularly on the job as well.”

Dive Insight:

Measuring gains in U.S. productivity from generative AI has so far proven challenging. The researchers make what they call a “highly speculative” estimate that the technology assists from 0.5% to 3.5% of total work hours, suggesting that it may boost productivity between 0.125 percentage point to 0.875 percentage point.

Gauging the productivity boost is difficult in part because the technology has mushroomed so rapidly since the release of Chat GPT in November 2022.

After two years, generative AI has achieved a 39.5% adoption rate, nearly double the 20% rate for the internet after two years and 20% for personal computers after three years, the researchers said in the NBER report.

By March 2024 the technology’s most common “tools had been accessed more than 3 billion times by hundreds of millions of users each month,” the researchers said, citing a prior study.

Among 10 tasks raised by the researchers, AI is considered most helpful in writing, interpreting and administrative support. Yet all the tasks — including coding and interpreting and summarizing text or data — hit usage rates of at least 25%, they said.

“My view is that AI, and generative AI in particular, is likely to become a general-purpose technology — one that spreads throughout the economy, sparks downstream innovation and continues to improve over time,” Fed Governor Lisa Cook said in a speech Monday.

“As firms deploy these technologies and workers discover ways to make use of them, such developments can create the conditions for greater productivity and thus higher wage growth consistent with stable prices,” she said.

Flagging a potential for gender inequality, the researchers said men are 9 percentage points more likely to use generative AI at work and 7 percentage points more likely to use it at home.

“In contrast, PC adoption at work was more common for women, possibly because of the transition between typewriters and word processors and the high female share of secretaries and other administrative occupations,” the researchers said.