Key takeaways:
- The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest business trends survey showed a 78% increase in the percentage of companies that will be using AI by August 2024.
- About a quarter of employees will see their tasks taken over by AI in some form, but at least 94.6% of companies said they are not cutting jobs due to AI use.
- Companies that use AI perform better than those that do not use AI, according to the government.
Since ChatGPT came out in November 2022, generative AI has taken off like a proverbial rocket. But how many businesses are actually adopting generative and other subsets of AI?
The U.S. Census Bureau – arguably a more neutral source than similar surveys conducted by the private sector – decided to find out. In its Business Trends and Outlook Survey from September 2023 to February 2024, it found that a “relatively low” but rising percentage of businesses are using AI.
Last September, 3.7% of companies surveyed said they were using AI. By February the following year, the figure had jumped 46% to 5.4%. Asked to look out six months, 6.6% said they would be using AI. That’s a 78% increase.
The Information sector (including tech companies) showed the highest adoption at 18% as of February, and the figure rises to 21.5% when asked to look out six months. Construction and agriculture came in lowest, at 1.4% and 1.5%, respectively.
The largest firms and smallest firms tend to be higher adopters of AI, compared to mid-sized companies. Those in western and northeastern states tend to have higher adoption vs. the south.
The most popular uses of AI are in marketing automation, virtual agents, natural language processing, and data/text analytics. On an employment-weighted basis, data analytics and robotics automation are the dominant types of use.
Notably, “the rapid developments in Generative AI have not yet led to an explosion of AI use among businesses,” the report said. “Still, we do find that AI use for business purposes is substantially higher” compared to periods before 2019.
Replacing tasks more than people
About 27% of companies are using AI to do tasks that employees normally do, but 34.4% expect to do so in the next six months – an increase of 30%. As of February, the Census Bureau said around 15% of staff saw their tasks being taken over by AI – a figure that will rise to 25% by August.
However, while many businesses use AI to replace worker tasks, equipment and software, “there is little evidence that AI use is associated with a decline in firm employment,” according to the Census Bureau. “In fact, an increase in employment as a result of AI use is more common than a decrease.”
The Census Bureau said at least 94.6% of companies that use AI said AI has not caused any job losses. Moreover, 6.5% of firms expect to hire more people by August, up from 2.8% as of February.
“Overall, the results do not indicate that a large fraction of firms has reduced, or will reduce,
employment due to AI use; though both increases and decreases in employment are expected to
be more prevalent in the future,” according to the government.
Further, companies that use AI tend to perform better at present and expect to do so in the future. Generally, a higher percentage of these companies fall in the “excellent” and “above average” performance categories compared to those not using or planning to use AI.
The survey sample comprised 1.2 million businesses that the U.S. Census Bureau asked to participate.
