I recently discovered the Generative AI Adoption Tracker and it’s a really interesting look at the data on how often Americans specifically are using AI tools such as ChatGPT both at work and in their personal lives.
Above is a snapshot of results from August 2024 through August 2025. The notable trend on both lines is an upward trend, although what’s most interesting to me is that the number of people using it in their personal lives is higher than those using it at work. There’s a narrative out there that some people are trying to sell that workplaces are "mandating AI" and that’s why usage is anything at all. It’s the "people don’t …
I recently discovered the Generative AI Adoption Tracker and it’s a really interesting look at the data on how often Americans specifically are using AI tools such as ChatGPT both at work and in their personal lives.
Above is a snapshot of results from August 2024 through August 2025. The notable trend on both lines is an upward trend, although what’s most interesting to me is that the number of people using it in their personal lives is higher than those using it at work. There’s a narrative out there that some people are trying to sell that workplaces are "mandating AI" and that’s why usage is anything at all. It’s the "people don’t want this" argument. To me, this data tells a story of people increasingly finding ways to use AI in their normal lives, even if they are don’t necessarily find it useful at work.
Side note: I do think that workplace bosses mandating AI tools or strongly suggesting that AI is the only way to keep up ought to interrogate why many workers aren’t adopting it like the bosses want them to. If a tool makes my job meaningfully better, AI or not, I’m gonna use it, you don’t have to convince me. Maybe some people are resistant to learn anything new, but my impression is that the gains bosses have promised have been too grand and the use cases too broad, so employees get a bad taste in their mouth.
Again, I’ll shout it from the rooftops, if a piece of software is revolutionary and will make workers’ jobs easier, they will use it. If you find you have to keep making the hard sell to your employees, maybe it’s not bringing as much value to them as you think.
Anyway…
There’s also a factor of job type. I personally have a job that happens 100% on a computer and benefits in many ways from AI-powered tools. That’s not everyone, though, so it’s not surprising that many people don’t find value from it at their workplace.
Of note, there’s no frequency on that graph above, that just shows how many people use it at all. If we filter down to people who say they use AI on a weekly basis, the numbers come down marginally.
And if we go down to people who use it on a daily basis, we get much further down the percentages.
So yeah, it’s fair to say not everyone is using AI all the time, but about half of US adults use it regularly, and at this growth pace, it’s on track to hit 2/3 of American adults by this time next year. That’s not too bad for a technology 0% of Americans were using just 3 years ago. Whether this will end up warranting the trillions of dollars being dumped into it now is another story.