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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Half of employees now use AI at work at least occasionally.
• Many of them also don't know their employers' AI strategy.
• AI is boosting productivity, but not reshaping workflows.

Half of all employees now use AI at work at least a few times each year, Gallup reported on Monday. Up from 46% last quarter, the new figure marks the polling company's highest-ever reported rate of AI usage in the workplace.

Among more frequent AI users, the number of employees who report using the technology on a daily basis was also up (13% compared to 12% last quarter), as were those who report using it a few times each week (28% vs. 26%).

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Based on a February survey of more than 23,700 US employees, the new report from Gallup highlights both that the use of AI in the workplace is continuing to climb and also that this increase is causing some structural changes within organizations.

The 'integration-adoption lag'

The poll found that 41% of respondents said their employers had begun officially incorporating the use of AI tools to boost organizational efficiency, a notably higher figure than the 28% of employees who are using it at least every week. Gallup calls this an "integration-adoption lag": employers' adoption of AI doesn't automatically translate to widespread employee use.

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At the same time, while 41% of employees said their employers had begun using AI internally "to improve organizational practices," far fewer (26%) said they have a roadmap: that their employers have not "communicated a clear plan for integrating AI into current practices." It echoes another recent Gallup poll, which found that just under one-quarter of employees surveyed didn't know if their employer had deployed any kind of organization-wide AI tools -- a communication gap between the top brass and the rank and file which, if the former actually is actively trying to onboard AI tools, could undercut the very productivity gains those are supposed to enable.

In short, while employees seem increasingly confident that their employers are using AI in some organization-wide capacity, many of those employers still aren't communicating the terms and scale of that usage in a clear, organized manner, which, according to Gallup, "may contribute to low comfort levels and limited adoption."

Structural shifts

Within those organizations that have actively begun using AI (and have clearly communicated that usage to their employees), the new Gallup poll found some internal restructuring: 27% of respondents employed by those companies reported major recent changes to employee headcount, compared to 17% of those working for companies that haven't adopted AI. 

Those changes were both positive -- meaning more employees were hired -- and negative -- meaning more were laid off.

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The changes were most prominent within small and medium-sized businesses. For example, out of all the survey respondents working for "AI-adopting organizations" with a headcount of 25-499, 39% said their employer has been hiring more employees, while 17% said their employer has been letting more people go, compared to 32% and 14%, respectively, for respondents working for companies that haven't adopted AI.

Changes to workflows

Another important finding from the new Gallup poll is related to the tangible impacts of AI usage upon employees' day-to-day workflows.

While two-in-three respondents said the technology has made them more productive at work, far fewer (just 12%) said they "strongly" feel that it's "transformed how work gets done." In other words, AI is like an energy jolt to existing procedures, but it's not (yet) fundamentally reshaping the procedures themselves. Employees are effectively using AI to do what they've always done, only faster.

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A recent report published by software company WalkMe, however, found that the growing use of AI in the workplace is actually leading to a lot of wasted time. 

Though enterprise-facing AI is generally designed to help employees cut back on routine tasks so they can focus on more impactful, cognitively demanding work, the new WalkMe data showed that lots of working time is now being sunk into just trying to get these tools to function properly. Many employees are spending moments each week transferring data from one tool to another, for example, or rephrasing prompts over and over again in order to produce a desired outputs.

All of those moments add up. The authors of that report estimated that employees using AI are wasting on average 7.9 hours per week -- about 51 working days per year -- due to the accumulation of all these little moments. "Employees are losing one full working day every week to friction, not to actual work, but to managing the tools that are supposed to help them work," they wrote.