26% of US workers used paid AI services for work last week

New polling suggests paying for AI tools is closely tied to actually using them on the job Roughly one in four American workers paid for artificial intelligence last week and then put it to work. A poll found that 26% of US workers used a paid AI service for their jobs in the past week. Who is paying, and who is working The paid-usage figure arrives alongside a broader March 2026 survey from Epoch AI, conducted with Ipsos. That survey polled more than 2,000 employed US adults. Half of them, 50%, said they had used AI tools in the past week. That count covers both work and personal use. Among those users, half said their work usage was at least equal to their personal usage. The more telling split is about who pays the bill. Among workers using AI through a subscription their employer provides, 76% were using it for work tasks. For people paying for a subscription out of their own pocket, work-oriented usage came in at 58%. Free-tier users trailed well behind, at 38%. The survey also asked what AI was actually doing for these workers. Among work-oriented users, 27% said the tools had replaced tasks they used to do. Another 21% said AI let them take on new kinds of work. Generative A...