AI Tools Usage Statistics 2026: Who Uses AI Tools and How Deeply

A little under half of U.S. adults (44%) now report using ChatGPT, up from 34% last year, according to Pew Research Center, and about half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024. Measurements for EU residents and U.S. businesses land lower. In the EU, 32.7% of people aged 16-74 used generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in 2025, per Eurostat, and the U.S. business AI use rate was 19.8% as of May 3, 2026, according to the Census Bureau. Those gaps run through all of the AI tools usage statistics below.

Each population stays separate here: adults, workers, businesses and the tool makers’ own counts. You’ll see which chatbots Americans use and how often, how much of the workday AI tools actually touch, and how company-reported user numbers compare with the wider AI market.

Key Takeaways

• In 2025, 32.7% of people aged 16-74 in the EU used generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, while 20.0% of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees used artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
• Workplace AI use is wide but shallow: in more than 80% of occupations, at least 1 in 5 workers uses AI on the job, but fewer than 3% of tasks have adoption rates above 50%, in Real-Time Population Survey indexes based on nearly 14,000 workers surveyed across four quarterly waves between August 2025 and May 2026.
• Between August 2024 and August 2025, nonwork generative AI adoption among adults ages 18 to 64 rose 12.7 percentage points, while work adoption among employed adults ages 18 to 64 rose 4.1 points (33.3% to 37.4%) in the Real-Time Population Survey.
• Among U.S. businesses, 37% of firms with at least 250 employees reported using AI in their business operations, compared with a national rate of 19.8%, according to the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey.
• The share of work hours saved thanks to AI assistance grew from 1.6% to 2.2% in the Real-Time Population Survey.
• 24% of U.S. adults say they ever use Gemini, against a little under half (44%) for ChatGPT.

Editor’s Choice

• ChatGPT weekly users: more than 1 billion weekly active users, according to OpenAI.
• Gemini app monthly users: 950 million monthly active users, per Alphabet’s Q2 2026 earnings call.
• Google model API volume: approximately 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion just a quarter ago.
• AI search summaries: 60% of U.S. adults say they ever read AI summaries at the top of a search engine result.
• Young Europeans: 63.8% of young people aged 16-24 in the EU used generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in 2025.
• U.S. workers: more than half of U.S. workers (52%) now use AI in their role, per Gallup’s Q2 2026 data.

How Many People Use AI Tools? Survey Benchmarks by Population

About This Data

Figures on this page come from 21 publications: 13 from statistics offices, Federal Reserve Bank research and company earnings releases, 5 from research organizations, and 3 OpenAI posts whose publication dates were not captured. Where a captured page shows a publication date, it falls between September 2024 and September 2026. Each figure keeps its producer’s period and population, so adults, workers, businesses and vendor counts are never merged. We review the page on a rolling basis and update figures when sources publish new editions.

• Pew’s 2026 figures come from a survey of 5,119 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 17-23, 2026.
• ChatGPT’s consumer product had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population by July 2025, according to an NBER working paper.
• In 2025, a third of people surveyed in the EU had used generative AI tools in the previous 3 months, and the most common reason for not using generative AI was that people simply didn’t feel the need to (64%).
• In the U.S., among the full sample of 1,163 respondents, 57% report using generative AI for at least one personal purpose, and 40% report an increase in their use of the technology over the past year, according to a November 2025 Brookings analysis of the AmeriSpeak Omnibus survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
• About one-in-five respondents use AI in their professional lives, although the share is sharply increasing by education and income.
• ChatGPT adoption has grown sharply across every continent since July 2023, and in relative terms the fastest growth has been in Africa and Asia, according to OpenAI.

Source: Pew Research Center 2026, Real-Time Population Survey 2025, Gallup Q2 2026, Eurostat 2025, Census Bureau BTOS 2026

Individuals report AI tool use far more often than organizations report deploying AI.

What percent of people use AI tools?

About half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, according to Pew Research Center’s February 2026 survey, and 32.7% of people aged 16-74 in the EU used generative AI tools in 2025, according to Eurostat. Among U.S. workers, more than half (52%) now use AI in their role, per Gallup.

Pew’s survey series tracks ChatGPT use across four survey years.

ChatGPT Usage Growth in the US and Worldwide

• The share of Americans who say they use ChatGPT has more than doubled since 2023.
• In 2026, the question also asked about other chatbots, so the latest reading is not strictly like-for-like with earlier years.
• OpenAI analyzed a 0.1% sample of users whose accounts were created between 2025-10-15 and 2026-05-01, with activity through 2026-05-31: six months after signing up, users whose accounts were created between 2025-10-15 and 2026-05-01 sent 50% more messages per day than they did when they signed up.
• Users whose accounts were created between 2025-10-15 and 2026-05-01 also doubled the number of distinct tasks they’ve tried on ChatGPT six months after signing up.
• Worldwide, early ChatGPT adopters were disproportionately male, but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and the NBER study finds higher growth rates in lower-income countries.

Survey shares and company-reported ChatGPT growth figures measure different things: one asks people whether they use the tool, the other reports what the company logs.

The past three months added several new measurements.

Recent Developments

• June 17, 2026: Pew Research Center reported that 13% of U.S. adults say they use chatbots for getting news.
• July 21, 2026: 47% of U.S. employees say their organization has integrated AI tools, up from 41% in the last quarter, according to Gallup.
• July 22, 2026: Since expanding AI Mode globally last October, Google has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users on AI Mode, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the Q2 2026 earnings call.
• July 24, 2026: FRED added 137 data series about the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the United States, drawn from the Real-Time Population Survey.
• July 29, 2026: Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats, Microsoft said in its fiscal fourth-quarter results.
• August 27, 2026: The share of employed adults who used generative AI for work in the past week grew from 28.2% in Q3 2024 to 39.2% by Q2 2026, the FRED Blog reported.

Counting users says little about how much of the workday AI tools touch.

How Deeply Workers Use AI Tools: Tasks, Hours and Time Saved

• In more than 80% of occupations, at least 1 in 5 workers uses AI on the job, and more than 40% of tasks have adoption rates above 20%, but AI adoption runs shallow almost everywhere: only 40% of occupations have adoption rates above 50%, and fewer than 3% of tasks have adoption rates above 50%, in indexes based on nearly 14,000 workers surveyed across four quarterly waves between August 2025 and May 2026, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
• The indexes track what share of workers in an occupation actually use AI and what share of individuals who perform a given job task use AI to complete it; a task’s adoption rate is the share of workers who perform the task and report using AI for it, and in the highest-adoption occupations, nearly everyone uses AI, but workers use it for different parts of their jobs.
• Each quarter, employed respondents report how fast and how intensely they’re adopting AI technology both at work and outside of work.
• The time-savings information is based on how respondents self-report their time saved, so the measurements are inherently approximate.

Source: FRED Blog, Real-Time Population Survey series, August 2026 (weekly work use Q3 2024 to Q2 2026; hours measures over roughly the same stretch)

Adoption headlines count anyone who touched an AI tool. These readings show how thin that use still is across a working week.

Key finding: In more than 80% of occupations, at least 1 in 5 workers uses AI on the job, yet fewer than 3% of tasks have adoption rates above 50%, based on nearly 14,000 workers surveyed across four quarterly waves between August 2025 and May 2026, per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The share of work hours saved thanks to AI assistance grew from 1.6% to 2.2%.

The same survey separates use at work from use outside it.

Generative AI Use at Work vs Outside Work

• In August 2024, 44.6% of adults ages 18 to 64 used generative AI overall, and in the last 12 months, adoption of this new technology increased by 10 percentage points to 54.6%.
• The initial result for generative AI usage was 39.4% in August 2024; by revising the sequencing, the updated result for August 2024 is 44.6%, so older citations of the lower figure are out of date.
• Between August 2024 and August 2025, nonwork adoption among adults rose 12.7 percentage points (36.0% to 48.7%), while work adoption among employed adults ages 18 to 64 rose 4.1 points (33.3% to 37.4%).
• On consumer plans (Free, Plus, Pro), 53% of ChatGPT messages were not related to work in June 2024, which climbed to 73% by June 2025, according to the same NBER paper, and work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations.
• Approximately 30% of consumer usage is work-related and approximately 70% is non-work, in OpenAI’s summary of the same research.

Both measures point the same way: use outside work is growing faster than use for work.

Pew’s tool-by-tool data shows where that use lands.

Which AI Tools People Use Most

• ChatGPT still dominates and its reach is growing, Pew Research Center concluded.
• The second-most-used platform is Gemini, which about a quarter of adults report using.
• This is followed by Copilot and Meta AI, and about one-in-ten or fewer say they use Grok, Claude or Character.ai.
• Company-reported, Gemini app daily active users tripled in the last year, Alphabet said on its Q2 2026 earnings call.
• Company-side Grok user numbers are measured on a different base than this survey of adults.

What AI tools do most people use?

U.S. adults report using ChatGPT far more than other chatbots: a little under half (44%) say they ever use it, and the second-most-used platform is Gemini, which about a quarter of adults report using, according to Pew Research Center’s February 2026 survey. Copilot and Meta AI follow, and about one-in-ten or fewer say they use Grok, Claude or Character.ai.

Trying a chatbot once and using it every day are different habits.

How Often Americans Use AI Chatbots and AI at Work

• About a quarter of U.S. adults use chatbots daily, Pew Research Center found.
• 16% of U.S. adults use AI chatbots several times a day or almost constantly.
• More than half of U.S. workers (52%) now use AI in their role, with 30% using it frequently (a few times a week or more), according to Gallup.
• A majority of Americans say they read AI summaries at the top of search results, a habit our AI Overviews data follows from the search side.

Use of these tools also differs by age.

AI Tool Usage by Age and Education

• Americans under 50 are far more likely than those 50 and older to use chatbots: about six-in-ten adults under 50 (63%) now use these tools, compared with about four-in-ten of those ages 50 to 64 and even fewer of those 65 and older.
• Chatbot use has risen over time among adults of all ages, and the steep increase for those in their 30s and 40s now puts them on par with younger adults.
• One-in-five adults under 30 say they ever turn to chatbots for emotional support or advice, and this drops to about one-in-ten of those ages 30 to 49.
• The share of EU young people using generative AI tools is nearly twice as high as the share of people in general population who used these tools, according to Eurostat.
• Among U.S. adults in the Brookings analysis, use of AI in a personal capacity reaches 60% among those with some college or an associate’s degree and 46% among those with a high school diploma or equivalent, and the use of AI in a personal capacity is highest for more educated respondents, based on the same AmeriSpeak Omnibus survey.

Source: Eurostat, 2025 data (news release February 2026 and Statistics Explained, data extracted March 2026)

Younger users also reach for AI tools for different reasons.

What People Use AI Tools For: Personal, Work and Education

• Young people are introducing the use of generative AI across different areas of life, according to Eurostat.
• The professional use was relatively similar between these age groups, as many young people have yet to enter the labor market.
• Most respondents who use generative AI for a personal purpose use it for internet searches or web browsing (74%), in the Brookings analysis of U.S. adults surveyed through the AmeriSpeak Omnibus survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago.
• Practical Guidance, Seeking Information and Writing are the three most common ChatGPT conversation topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations in the consumer-plan sample, according to the NBER paper.
• Writing dominates work-related tasks, while coding and self-expression remain niche activities.

The formal-education row shows the widest gap between the two age groups, and it is the kind of use our AI in education data follows at school level.

Specialized deployments such as AI in healthcare sit outside these general-purpose surveys, which ask about everyday tools rather than clinical systems.

Conversation logs from one tool show a different split, by type of interaction.

How People Use ChatGPT: Asking, Doing and Expressing

• Asking is a growing and highly rated category that shows people value ChatGPT most as an advisor rather than only for task completion, according to OpenAI.
• Doing makes up about 40% of messages on consumer plans and constitutes nearly 56% of work-related queries, according to the NBER paper.
• Expressing captures uses that are neither asking nor doing, usually involving personal reflection, exploration, and play.
• Over time, users both did more things and did things more on ChatGPT.

Workplace surveys show what employees ask AI tools to do.

AI Tool Use at Work in the US

• Reported organizational adoption of AI grew sharply in Q2 2026, and one in five employees remain unsure as to whether their organization has integrated AI tools, unchanged from prior quarters, according to Gallup.
• Coding and automation users report the largest productivity gains.
• Individual AI use at work has also risen steadily in the past year.

Whether that use turns into lasting skill depends on training access, which our digital skills gap figures measure.

Firm-level counts come out lower still.

US Business AI Adoption by Firm Size and Sector

• The BTOS data (December 2025 to May 2026) show that overall AI usage hovered between 17% and 20%, and that between 20% and 23% of businesses expected to be using it in the next six months, while less than 20% of firms with four or fewer employees reported using AI, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Between December 2025 and May 2026, AI use increased among firms with at least 20 employees but didn’t change significantly among firms with fewer than 20 employees.
• 37% of firms with at least 250 employees reported using AI in their business operations, and in the data collection period ending May 3, 2026, 32% of firms with 100 to 249 employees said they used AI.
• As of May 3, 2026, the AI use rates in the Information (39.7%) and Finance and Insurance (33.9%) sectors were both higher than the national rate (19.8%) but neither reported significant shifts since December.

Source: Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, data collected December 14, 2025 to May 3, 2026

By the numbers: As of May 3, 2026, the AI use rates in the Information (39.7%) and Finance and Insurance (33.9%) sectors were both higher than the national rate (19.8%), per the U.S. Census Bureau. 37% of firms with at least 250 employees reported using AI in their business operations. Firm-level adoption still turns on size and sector.

Eurostat’s country data shows how uneven individual use is across Europe.

Generative AI Tool Use Across EU Countries

• In Eurostat’s rounded Statistics Explained summary, the highest rates were in Denmark (48%), Estonia and Malta (both 47%), and Finland (46%).
• The chart uses Eurostat’s December 2025 release, whose information comes from data on the use of ICT in households and by individuals.
• For the separate Statistics Explained article, data was extracted in March 2026 and the planned article update is April 2027, according to Eurostat.

Enterprise adoption follows a similar map.

EU Enterprise AI Adoption by Year and Country

• In 2025, AI use among EU enterprises with 10 or more employees showed a solid growth of 6.5 percentage points (pp) from 2024.
• The highest shares of these enterprises in 2025 were in Denmark (42.0%), Finland (37.8%) and Sweden (35.0%).
• At the other end were Romania (5.2%), Poland (8.4%) and Bulgaria (8.5%).
• Denmark registered the highest increase (+14.5 pp), followed by Finland (+13.5 pp), and almost all EU countries recorded increases in the share of enterprises using AI technologies compared with the previous year.
• Denmark has the most widespread individual use of generative AI tools and the highest share of AI-using enterprises, while Romania and Bulgaria sit near the bottom on both measures.

Source: Eurostat, news release December 2025 (2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 data)

Tool makers publish their own counts, measured in their own ways.

AI Tools Usage Statistics Reported by Vendors

• OpenAI products include an advertising-supported free tier that helps keep ChatGPT available to more than 1 billion weekly active users.
• The Gemini app now has 950 million monthly active users, and more than 9 million developers are building each month with Google’s models across its APIs and key developer products, Alphabet reported.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats, Microsoft said in results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.

Source: OpenAI (captured September 2026), Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call, Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings release

Worth noting: OpenAI counts more than 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT, while Alphabet reports 950 million monthly active users for the Gemini app and Microsoft reports over 30 million paid seats for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Weekly actives, monthly actives and paid seats count different things, so these figures can’t be ranked against each other.

These counts describe product reach; spending and revenue sit in our separate generative AI market figures.

Conclusion

A little under half of U.S. adults (44%) now report using ChatGPT, yet the national business AI use rate stood at 19.8%, and fewer than 3% of job tasks have adoption rates above 50%, based on nearly 14,000 workers surveyed across four quarterly waves between August 2025 and May 2026. People have adopted AI tools more widely than businesses have.

For IT leads, these AI tools usage statistics point to depth, not access, as the real gap; for the smallest businesses, adoption itself still lags. Watch the St. Louis Fed’s quarterly adoption series and Eurostat’s next household and enterprise surveys for the first sign that it narrows.