A national tracker finds workplace use is growing, but generative AI still accounts for a small share of total work time.
Nearly half of employed U.S. adults said they used generative AI for work in May, according to the GenAI Adoption Tracker.
The tracker found that 45.2% of employed respondents used generative AI for their jobs in May. That was up from 40.7% in November 2025 in the same survey series.
Use does not mean people spend most of their working day with AI. The tracker estimates that generative AI accounted for 6.3% of total work hours in May. It also estimates time savings equal to 2.2% of total work hours.
The figures come from the Real-Time Population Survey, a nationally representative U.S. survey of adults aged 18 to 64. The tracker measures individual use of generative AI at work. It does not measure how many employers have formally adopted AI, and it does not directly measure business output or economy-wide productivity.
It’s important to note that a worker may use generative AI for writing, research, analysis, or other tasks even if their employer has not rolled it out across the organization.
The research behind the tracker was published in Management Science in January. It found that generative AI had spread faster at work than the personal computer did after its mass-market launch.
The latest data show that generative AI is no longer limited to a small group of early users. The bigger question is whether the time it saves will produce lasting gains in productivity.
