One in five US workers now hands tasks to AI, not colleagues
A new representative survey from Epoch AI and polling firm Ipsos quantifies how far AI has crept into everyday work: one in five employed Americans now hands at least one task to a machine that used to go to a person.
One in five employed US adults now delegates at least one work task to AI that previously went to a coworker or outside contractor, according to a survey of 1,106 workers by Epoch AI and Ipsos. The poll, fielded July 10–19, asked about ten common knowledge-work tasks drawn from US Department of Labor data and found AI in use across all of them — with wide variation. Adoption runs highest in computer systems and software development, where 57 percent of people doing that work use AI, followed by data analysis at 46 percent and reading work documents at 39 percent; record-keeping trails at 25 percent.
Most usage is partial support rather than takeover. Only in software development does full or near-full AI completion reach 10 percent of tasks; everywhere else it stays below 7 percent. The clearest human-to-machine shift shows up in data analysis, where 7.1 percent of respondents say AI has taken over work people used to handle, with document reading (5.7 percent) and record-keeping (5.3 percent) close behind. Epoch AI stresses that substitution does not automatically mean displacement: workers are shifting tasks, not losing jobs wholesale.
The time-saving story is messier than the headline. When AI handles only part of a task, workers report saving time 37 percent of the time; when it does most or all of the work, that rises to 53 percent. But roughly one in six AI-assisted tasks now takes longer than before — possibly because prompting eats time, or because workers use the slack to do things more thoroughly. Trust in the output is high either way: 66 percent of AI-generated work is used unchanged or with only light edits, though just 6 percent ships with zero changes.
Epoch AI's own summary is the most useful line in the study: AI is a "versatile but usually not self-sufficient workplace tool." The data points to a redistribution of tasks between humans and machines rather than the full automation of jobs — a picture consistent with earlier readings. Gallup found 45 percent of US workers using AI on the job last August (though only 10 percent daily), and an Anthropic survey of Claude users found half believed AI could already handle 50 percent or more of their work. The Epoch numbers are the first representative, task-level look at how that usage actually substitutes for human hands.
What to watch: whether the one-in-six slower-task finding widens as workers offload more to agents — and whether "delegating to AI" starts showing up in job descriptions as a required skill.
Does handing a task to AI instead of a colleague change what collaboration means at your workplace? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Epoch AI · Ipsos · The Decoder
