AI Statistics 2026: Adoption, Market Size, Jobs & Trust
49% of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024 (Pew Research Center, 2026). Worldwide, 18.8% of the working-age population used a generative AI product in June 2026 (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026). Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending of $2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5% in a year (Gartner, 2026).
This is the broad picture: consumer use, business adoption, money, compute, jobs, trust, and country rankings, each figure with its primary source and year. For narrower cuts, see AI in the workplace statistics, AI agent statistics, and ChatGPT statistics.
How many people use AI?
49% of U.S. adults say they use an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, and 24% use one at least daily (Pew Research Center, 2026). The survey covered 5,119 adults in February 2026. Before 2026, Pew asked whether people had ever used a chatbot and got 33% in August 2024, so the two numbers aren’t a perfect match.
61.8% of Americans ages 18 to 64 used generative AI as of May 2026 (GenAI Adoption Tracker, Bick, Blandin and Deming, 2026). The same researchers find generative AI reached about 44% adoption at work in a third of the time personal computers took.
1 billion people turn to ChatGPT every week, OpenAI said on August 6, 2026 (OpenAI, 2026). More on that product in ChatGPT statistics.
44% of U.S. adults use ChatGPT, against 24% for Gemini, 17% for Copilot, 14% for Meta AI, 8% for Grok, and 6% for Claude (Pew Research Center, 2026).
60% of U.S. adults say they read the AI summaries at the top of search results (Pew Research Center, 2026). Many people use AI without opening a chatbot at all.
64% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they use an AI chatbot, per a fall 2025 survey (Pew Research Center, 2026).
53% population adoption within three years: generative AI spread faster than the personal computer or the internet did over the same stretch (Stanford AI Index 2026, 2026).
$172 billion a year is the estimated value U.S. consumers get from generative AI tools as of early 2026, up from $112 billion a year earlier, while the median value per user tripled from $3.40 to $11.40 (Stanford AI Index, 2026). Most of those tools are free or close to it.
Just under 50% of Claude chat and Cowork conversations are personal use on weekends, against about 35% on weekdays (Anthropic Economic Index, 2026). Anthropic makes Claude, so this is first-party data.
How many workers use AI on the job?
52% of U.S. employees now use AI in their role, 30% use it a few times a week or more, and 15% use it daily (Gallup, Q2 2026).
39.2% of employed U.S. adults used generative AI for work in the past week by Q2 2026, up from 28.2% in Q3 2024 (St. Louis Fed FRED Blog, 2026).
38% of employed U.S. adults use chatbots for tasks at work (Pew Research Center, 2026).
62% of workers across 32 countries say AI has saved them time at work in the last 12 months (Ipsos AI Monitor, 2026).
58% of employees globally are intentionally using AI at work, but 57% say they hide their use and present AI-generated work as their own (KPMG and the University of Melbourne, 2025). The study surveyed over 48,000 people in 47 countries.
Industry, role, and age breakdowns are in AI in the workplace statistics, and the automation side in workplace automation statistics.
How many businesses use AI?
Nearly nine in ten survey respondents report regular AI use in at least one business function, and 44% say AI is scaling across their enterprise, up from 38% a year earlier (McKinsey, The State of AI, 2026). The survey drew 1,719 participants in 97 nations in May and June 2026.
88% of organizations used AI in at least one business function in 2025, up from 78% in 2024 (Stanford AI Index, 2026, drawing on McKinsey’s 2025 survey).
56% of respondents say their organizations use AI in three or more functions, up from 51% (McKinsey, 2026).
32% of respondents say their organizations decided against buying at least one software product because they could build it in-house with agentic coding tools (McKinsey, 2026).
19.8% of all U.S. businesses used AI as of May 2026, with 39.7% in the Information sector, 33.9% in Finance and Insurance, and around 14% in Retail Trade (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026). The Census figure counts every firm, including the smallest, which is why it runs far below corporate surveys.
20% to 23% of U.S. businesses expected to be using AI within six months, across December 2025 to May 2026 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026).
20.0% of EU enterprises with 10 or more employees used AI in 2025, up from 13.5% in 2024 and 8.1% in 2023 (Eurostat, 2025).
47% of U.S. employees say their organization has integrated AI tools to improve productivity, efficiency, or quality, up from 41% the previous quarter (Gallup, Q2 2026).
Small firms get their own breakdown in small business AI statistics, marketing teams in AI marketing statistics, and customer-facing bots in chatbot statistics.
Is AI paying off for companies?
37% of respondents say AI has contributed to their organization’s EBIT, essentially unchanged from 2025 (McKinsey, 2026).
28% of respondents say their organizations spend more than 10% of their total information and communication technology budget on AI, and 60% expect AI investment to rise over the next year (McKinsey, 2026).
14% to 15% more issues resolved per hour for customer support agents with an AI assistant, and 26% more pull requests for software developers using GitHub Copilot, in the studies the AI Index reviewed (Stanford AI Index, 2026). Gains are smaller in work that needs deeper judgment.
How big is the AI market?
Everything in the Gartner paragraphs below is a forecast.
$2.7 trillion in worldwide AI spending is Gartner’s forecast for 2026, up from $1.79 trillion in 2025, rising to $3.64 trillion in 2027 (Gartner, 2026).
$1.48 trillion of that 2026 total is AI infrastructure, the largest single category, with AI services at $576 billion and AI software at $462 billion (Gartner, 2026).
$28.3 billion will go to generative AI models in 2026, and Gartner raised that segment’s growth forecast from 110% to 117% (Gartner, 2026).
$581.69 billion in global corporate AI investment was made in 2025, up 129.9% from 2024, counting mergers, minority stakes, private investment, and public offerings (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
$344.7 billion of that was private investment, up 127.5%, and $170.9 billion went to generative AI companies, nearly half of all private AI funding (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
$285.9 billion in U.S. private AI investment in 2025 was more than 23 times China’s $12.4 billion, though the AI Index notes that private figures likely understate China’s spending through government guidance funds (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
1,953 newly funded AI companies came from the U.S. in 2025, more than 10 times the next country (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
How fast are AI models and compute growing?
17.1 million H100-equivalents of AI compute existed worldwide by 2025, growing about 3.3x a year since 2022, and Nvidia chips account for over 60% of it (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
5,427 data centers are in the United States, more than ten times any other country (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
29.6 GW of AI data center power capacity existed by Q4 2025, enough to power New York state at peak demand (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
59 notable AI models came from the U.S. in 2025, against 35 from China and 8 from South Korea, and industry produced over 90% of notable models (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
About 66% task success on OSWorld, a benchmark of real computer tasks, up from 12%, though agents still fail roughly one in three attempts (Stanford AI Index, 2026). For how that is playing out in business, see AI agent statistics.
362 documented AI incidents were recorded in 2025, up from 233 in 2024 (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
Is AI taking jobs?
19% below trend: employment of workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations now stands 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, and experienced workers show no comparable gap (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2026).
39% of respondents expect AI to decrease their organization’s head count over the next year, up from 32% a year earlier, while 43% expect little or no change (McKinsey, 2026).
14% of respondents at organizations using AI say it contributed to a decline in workforce size in the past year, less than half the 32% who had expected cuts (McKinsey, 2026). Predicted layoffs have run well ahead of reported ones.
2.6% of all U.S. job postings required AI skills in 2025, against 4.69% in Singapore, the highest share tracked (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
64% of Americans think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years (Pew Research Center, 2025).
73% of AI experts expect a positive impact on how people do their jobs over the next 20 years, against 23% of U.S. adults (Pew Research Center, 2025).
Layoff counts and displacement forecasts are in AI replacing jobs statistics.
Do people trust AI?
50% of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited, and just 10% are more excited than concerned (Pew Research Center, June 2025 survey).
63% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, and only 2% say too slowly (Pew Research Center, 2026).
40% of U.S. adults expect AI to have a negative impact on society over the next 20 years, against 16% who expect a positive one (Pew Research Center, 2026).
67% of Americans have little or no confidence in the U.S. government to regulate AI effectively, up from 62% in 2024 (Pew Research Center, 2026).
46% of people globally are willing to trust AI systems, even though 66% use AI with some regularity (KPMG and the University of Melbourne, 2025).
70% of people globally believe AI regulation is needed, but only 43% think existing laws are adequate (KPMG and the University of Melbourne, 2025).
66% of people across 32 countries expect AI to have a greater impact on their daily lives in the next three to five years (Ipsos AI Monitor, 2026).
How many AI laws are there?
150 AI-related bills were passed into law across U.S. states in 2025, up from fewer than 10 in 2020, and California enacted 20 of them (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
25 AI-related bills passed into law in the United States between 2016 and 2025, the most of any G20 country, followed by South Korea with 17 (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
February 2, 2025 is when the EU AI Act’s first measures took effect, banning uses such as predictive policing and emotion recognition (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
Which countries use AI the most?
73.3% of the working-age population in the United Arab Emirates used generative AI in Q2 2026, the highest rate of any economy, followed by Singapore at 64.3% (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026).
33.0% is the U.S. rate, which ranks 21st, behind Ireland (49.9%), France (49.6%), the United Kingdom (43.7%), and Canada (38.5%) (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026). Microsoft measures this from its own device telemetry, adjusted for market share and population.
17.5% in China and 18.5% in India, both near the global average (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026).
28.8% usage in the Global North against 16.2% in the Global South, a gap that widened again in Q2 2026 (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026).
3.5 percentage points was South Korea’s gain in a single quarter, the largest of any economy, taking it to 40.6% (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026).
42.0% of Danish enterprises used AI in 2025, the highest in the EU, followed by Finland (37.8%) and Sweden (35.0%), while Romania was lowest at 5.2% (Eurostat, 2025).
Why AI adoption numbers range from 18% to 88%
The surveys measure different things. Microsoft’s 18.8% is the share of all working-age people worldwide using a generative AI product in a quarter. The Census Bureau’s 19.8% is the share of all U.S. businesses, most of them tiny, using AI in the past two weeks. Pew’s 49% is U.S. adults who say they use a chatbot. McKinsey’s “nearly nine in ten” comes from a global survey of executives and managers reporting AI use in at least one business function.
When you cite an AI adoption rate, name the survey, the year, and who was asked. Each series above rose between 2024 and 2026.
Where everyday AI use goes next
Most of the use above is still someone typing a prompt into a chatbot. The next step is AI that handles recurring work without being asked each time. Carly is an AI assistant that runs email, scheduling, and follow-up across the tools a team already uses, and Carly connects to thousands of apps. See what AI agents are and the best AI personal assistants.
FAQ
What percentage of people use AI? 49% of U.S. adults use AI chatbots (Pew Research Center, 2026), and 61.8% of Americans ages 18 to 64 used generative AI as of May 2026 (GenAI Adoption Tracker, 2026). Worldwide, 18.8% of the working-age population used a generative AI product in June 2026 (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, 2026).
How many companies use AI? Nearly nine in ten McKinsey respondents report AI use in at least one business function (McKinsey, 2026). Counting every U.S. business including the smallest, the rate is 19.8% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2026), and in the EU it is 20.0% of enterprises with 10 or more employees (Eurostat, 2025).
How big is the AI market? Gartner forecasts $2.7 trillion in worldwide AI spending in 2026, up 49.5% (Gartner, 2026). Global corporate AI investment reached $581.69 billion in 2025 (Stanford AI Index, 2026).
Do Americans trust AI? Mostly not yet: 50% are more concerned than excited about AI (Pew Research Center, 2025), 63% say it is advancing too quickly, and 67% have little or no confidence in the government to regulate it (Pew Research Center, 2026).
Related: AI Agent Statistics · AI in the Workplace Statistics · Small Business AI Statistics · ChatGPT Statistics · AI Marketing Statistics · AI Replacing Jobs Statistics · Chatbot Statistics · Workplace Automation Statistics
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