Pew AI chatbot survey: 38% of employed adults use them at work
The Pew AI chatbot survey, published on June 17, 2026, found that 38% of employed US adults use AI chatbots for tasks at work, making work the second most common use after searching for information. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,119 adults in February 2026, and 49% said they use chatbots, up from 33% in 2024. For employers, it means a large share of staff already bring these tools to the job.
How many US workers use AI chatbots on the job
Among employed adults, 38% say they use AI chatbots for tasks at work, according to the Pew Research Center. Only searching for information is more common, at 42% of all adults. Pew counts as employed anyone working full or part time for pay at the time of the survey.
The survey reached 5,119 U.S. adults from Feb. 17 to 23, 2026, all members of Pew's American Trends Panel, and it represents the full U.S. adult population. Other uses trail work: 25% use chatbots for fun, 24% to create or edit images or videos, 20% for medical advice and 13% to get news.
How fast chatbot use has grown since 2024
Chatbot use has risen sharply in two years. In 2026, 49% of U.S. adults say they use AI chatbots, compared with 33% in 2024. About a quarter use them daily: 24% in total, including 12% several times a day and 4% almost constantly.
ChatGPT remains the most used tool. Pew found that 44% of adults use it, up from 34% in 2025 and 18% in 2023. Gizmodo, reporting on the same survey, listed Google's Gemini at 24%, Microsoft Copilot at 17%, Meta AI at 14%, xAI's Grok at 8%, Anthropic's Claude at 6% and Character.ai at 3%.
Which Americans use chatbots most
Age and income drive the gap. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 66% use chatbots, falling to 61% of those aged 30 to 49, 42% of those aged 50 to 64 and 23% of those 65 and older, Gizmodo reported. By income, 66% of upper-income adults use them, compared with 49% in the middle and 41% in the lower-income group.
For employers, this means the youngest staff are the most likely to arrive already using chatbots, and older teams may need more support.
Why many Americans still avoid chatbots
About half of adults do not use chatbots at all, and their reasons point to trust. Among non-users, 83% say they are not interested, 79% are concerned about how their personal information will be used, 76% do not trust they will get accurate information and 55% say they do not know how to use them.
Wider attitudes are cautious. Only 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society. Seventy-one percent believe AI will make their personal information less secure. On productivity, 30% say AI helps and 5% say it hurts.
What the survey means for employers
The figures describe a workforce in which many people already use chatbots at work while large groups distrust them. Gizmodo noted that sharing proprietary or sensitive information with AI systems can be a problem for businesses, and that research suggests workers sometimes use unauthorized AI tools despite warnings.
For a company, the practical tasks follow from Pew's numbers. Staff who use chatbots need clear rules on what data may go into them. Staff who avoid them because they do not know how, a reason 55% of non-users give, need training. And with 76% of non-users doubting accuracy, any rollout needs a way to check what the tools produce.
How Americans see the government's role
Most adults doubt that AI will be well managed. According to Gizmodo's reading of the survey, 67% have little or no confidence in elected officials to regulate AI. Fifty-nine percent are not confident that companies will develop and deploy it responsibly. That leaves much of the responsibility with each employer.
Questions and answers
What percentage of workers use AI chatbots at work?
According to Pew's survey conducted Feb. 17 to 23, 2026, 38% of employed U.S. adults say they use AI chatbots for tasks at work.
Which AI chatbot do Americans use most?
ChatGPT. Pew found that 44% of U.S. adults use it, up from 34% in 2025. Google's Gemini was second at 24%, according to Gizmodo's report on the survey.
Why do people not use AI chatbots?
Among non-users, 83% say they are not interested, 79% worry about how their personal information will be used, 76% doubt the accuracy of answers and 55% do not know how to use them.
MOZGII view
How we would build it
When more than a third of employed adults already use chatbots for work, the question for a company is not whether staff use AI. It is whether they use it on company data, in tools the company can see, with answers someone checks. The survey's non-users give the same list of worries: personal information, accuracy and not knowing how.
If we were building an internal assistant for a mid-sized company, we would start with the data people actually need: policies, product documents, past tickets and templates, with access tied to each employee's role. The assistant would answer from those documents and show which document each answer came from, so a reader can check it in seconds. Anything that leaves the company, such as a customer email or a contract clause, would go to a person for approval first. We would also log what kinds of data people paste in, and block the categories the company forbids.
It would break where documents are out of date or contradict each other, and where staff keep using outside chatbots because the internal one is slower. The one metric we would watch is the share of employees who use the approved assistant at least weekly, because a low number means the outside tools are still winning.
Next, we would build short role-based lessons inside the assistant itself, aimed at people who avoid chatbots because they do not know how to use them.
Sources
Where the facts in this story come from.