US employees who use artificial intelligence (AI) at work mostly report gains in speed and creativity, but new Gallup research finds that the benefits are not evenly shared across the workforce.
Regular AI use is far more common among people who already hold quality jobs, such as college graduates and managers, according to the first results from the second year of Gallup’s American Job Quality Study.
The findings rely on employees’ own assessments of how AI affects their work, and Gallup notes they do not establish whether employers would judge its effects the same way.
What workers say AI does for them
Among employees who have used AI in their job, 63% say it helps them do their work faster, and 56% say it helps them find more creative solutions. Smaller shares say it lets them spend more time on the most interesting parts of their job (47%) or helps them produce higher-quality work (46%).
About 31% of AI users say their use has led their employer to ask them to take on more responsibilities, and the share rises to 37% among users who say AI helps them work faster. Among AI users, employees aged 18 to 24 are the most likely to report being given more responsibility, at 38%, compared with 31% or less in every other age group.
Who uses it regularly
Frequent use, defined as daily or weekly, is not yet the norm. In Gallup’s January to March 2026 data, 28% of employees said they use AI at least weekly, while 54% said they had not used it in their role at all.
The gaps by education and role are large. College graduates are more than twice as likely as workers without a college degree to use AI daily or weekly (40% versus 17%), and 37% of managers are regular users compared with 25% of individual contributors.
Use also varies by industry. Roughly half of employees in professional and business services, financial activities, and information and media use AI regularly, while in healthcare support, manufacturing production, and retail sales, between 70% and more than 80% never use it in their role.
The link to job quality
Gallup measures job quality using several criteria, and regular AI users are substantially more likely to hold a quality job. Among employees who use AI at least weekly, 52% have one, compared with 46% of infrequent users and 32% of workers who never use AI.
Gallup cautions that more research is needed to understand the relationship, because the same groups that tend to have quality jobs, including the more highly educated, managers, and workers in certain industries, also report higher AI use. The data show a correlation, not proof that AI creates better jobs.
Even among users, benefits differ
Regular users report far more benefit than occasional ones. Among daily or weekly users, 79% say AI helps them finish tasks faster, versus 38% of irregular users, and 59% say it improves the quality of their work, versus 26%.
Some benefits also accrue more to certain groups of users. More than two-thirds of four-year college graduates who use AI (68%) say it helps them work faster, compared with 51% of users with a high school education or less, though gains in creativity and quality were similar across education levels.
Younger users under 55 also report more benefit than older users, with 64% saying they complete tasks faster compared with 54%, and 49% saying they can focus more on interesting work compared with 40%. Pay shows a similar pattern, as 70% of those earning US$10,000 (RM40,842) or more a month say AI speeds up their work, versus 62% of those earning US$4,000 (RM16,336) to US$9,999 (RM40,837) and 58% of those earning less than US$4,000 (RM16,336).
A question of voice
A central question for the years ahead is whether the benefits workers already report will spread more broadly or stay concentrated among those already in better jobs.
One signal comes from a related measure of worker agency. In 2026, 52% of all employees said they have less influence over the adoption of new technology than they would like.
What business owners can take from it
For business owners, the main lesson is that AI will not spread its benefits evenly on its own. If the people most likely to use it are already your managers and college-educated staff, rolling it out without a plan can widen gaps inside your company between those who gain speed and creativity and those who do not.
The data also suggest practical steps, including offering training and access to roles where AI use is low, and giving employees a real say in how new tools are adopted. Gallup’s finding that more than half of employees want more influence over technology decisions suggests that involving them is both a fairness question and a way to get better results from the tools you buy. – Inc./Tribune News Service
