AI Has Replaced Work for 1 in 5 U.S. Employees

The Finding: One in Five Workers, AI Is Doing Their Jobs

Twenty percent of full-time U.S. employees say that artificial intelligence has replaced tasks that were previously part of their jobs, according to a survey conducted by Epoch AI and Ipsos and reported by NBC News. The survey included 2,021 adults and was conducted March 3-5, 2026 - providing a snapshot of AI’s penetration into American workplaces at the start of the year.

The finding does not mean 20% of workers have been laid off. It means that one in five report that AI is now doing things that they previously did - a shift in job composition that is happening inside existing employment relationships, not only through headcount reduction.

Which Tools Are Driving the Change

ChatGPT is the most widely used AI tool among the workers surveyed, with 31% of respondents reporting they use it for work tasks. Google’s Gemini was used by 21% of respondents. Microsoft Copilot, integrated into Office productivity tools used by millions of enterprise employees, was used by 10.5%.

Eight percent of respondents said they currently use AI agents - systems that can execute multi-step tasks autonomously rather than responding to individual prompts - for their daily work. That figure, while smaller than overall AI tool adoption, represents a meaningful slice of the workforce already operating with autonomous AI systems embedded in their workflows.

New Work Created by AI

The survey also captured the other side of AI’s impact on work composition. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had been assigned new job tasks specifically because of their organization’s AI capabilities - work that did not exist before AI tools became available to the team.

The coexistence of task replacement (20%) and new task creation (15%) within the same survey population reflects the dual dynamic that economists have theorized about AI’s labor market effects: displacement in some task areas, augmentation and new role creation in others. Both effects are measurable and currently present in the U.S. workforce simultaneously.

What the Data Signals About the Pace of Change

The Epoch AI/Ipsos survey captures a moment in which AI’s impact on daily work is no longer hypothetical or limited to early adopters. One in five full-time employees reporting task replacement, and nearly one in three using ChatGPT for work, suggests mainstream adoption across job types and industries.

The 8% using AI agents - systems capable of autonomous multi-step execution - represents the leading edge of a more fundamental shift in how work is structured. As agent capabilities mature and enterprise adoption accelerates, the percentage of workers operating alongside autonomous AI systems is likely to rise. The March 2026 survey provides a benchmark against which future measurements of AI’s labor market footprint will be compared.

References: AI job work replace task help