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Workers who use artificial intelligence regularly at work report clear productivity and creativity benefits, but a new survey finds those gains are concentrated among better-educated employees and managers rather than spread evenly across the U.S. workforce.
What the study measured
The American Job Quality Study — produced by Gallup, Jobs for the Future and The Families & Workers Fund and conducted from January through March — asked U.S. workers about their use of AI on the job and the effects they experienced. Among employees who have used AI at work, 63% said it helps them complete tasks faster and 56% said it helps them find more creative solutions. Nearly half reported it lets them spend more time on the most interesting parts of their job (47%) and that it helps them produce higher-quality work (46%).
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Who is using AI most
The survey found a marked gap by education and job role. College graduates were more than twice as likely as workers without a degree to use AI on a daily or weekly basis (40% versus 17%). By role, 37% of managers were regular AI users compared with 25% of individual contributors.
Regular users (defined in the study as daily or weekly users) were also far more likely than irregular users to report concrete benefits. For example, 79% of regular users said AI helped them complete tasks faster, compared with 37% of irregular users. Regular users were more likely than irregular users to report AI helped them generate creative solutions (67% versus 39%), produce higher-quality work (59% versus 26%) and focus on more interesting parts of their jobs (61% versus 27%).
Why the gap matters
Molly Blankenship, associate vice president of strategy and impact at Jobs for the Future and one of the study’s leaders, told FOX Business that while many workers are already experiencing benefits from AI, “they are not being shared evenly, they’re not reaching all workers.” She said the higher AI uptake among college graduates aligns with broader patterns in job quality, noting, “people in higher-quality jobs are more likely to be satisfied at work, are less likely to have intentions to leave, and we’re seeing strong correlations between people who are using AI and who are already in quality jobs.”
Blankenship said the consequences extend beyond productivity measures. “If we’ve got people who are more satisfied, more able to complete their tasks, more able to focus on the interesting parts, etc., then that’s a good thing and a thing we need to promote and make as widely accessible as possible,” she said on FOX Business. “What we’re seeing in our data is that those benefits are not being shared widely, and some people aren’t getting to reap the spoils of being as satisfied or engaged.”
Workers’ reported benefits
Respondents described a consistent set of workplace advantages when AI was used: speed, creativity and quality. Blankenship summarized those findings, saying the main reported benefit is “the ability to do their work faster, get done and get through work faster,” and that AI can also let workers “produce higher-quality work even as they’re moving faster, find more creative solutions to the problems that they’re facing at work, and to focus on the more interesting parts of their job while letting AI support them in getting through more rote tasks.”
The American Job Quality Study’s results point to a widening gap between workers who already access AI tools in their roles and those who do not, raising questions for employers and policymakers about access, training and how to distribute the benefits of AI across different education levels and job types.
