41 Stats That Tell the Story of AI Right Now

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, 41-ish stats that tell the story of AI right now. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Now, one very frequent type of content in the 23, 24, 25 era of the AI Daily Brief was to take some big new report from one of the big professional services firms and analyze all the interesting stats they're in about adoption and corporate usage and things like that. I've been doing a lot less of that this year, and it's certainly not because the number of studies or anything have slowed down. I think the reason is that in so many cases, the stats that come out of surveys just feel so disconnected from the reality of AI capability that they feel almost not useful. Now, this is of course another byproduct of the shift that happened around the beginning of this year as we got a new set of models, people started to understand the importance of harnesses, and agentic AI truly came online. In that, the world has pretty much separated itself into those who recognize and are trying to adapt to this totally new way of working, and on the other hand, those who are still laboring under some old model. Now, obviously, everyone in every company has their own journey in AI, and there are plenty of good reasons why a lot of people who will eventually adopt agents in advanced AI haven't yet. But at the same time, from my standpoint, thinking about the audience that I want to support, I've had less and less energy for trying to convince people to use AI, and wanted to instead spend more of that energy on helping people who had already made that decision figure out how to do it well, thus leading to the AI Summer Adventure and Claw Camp and Agent OS and all those things. And yet, if we are trying to tell a complete story about AI adoption, the truth is that we are still very, very early, and in the many ways the gap between the people on the frontier and the vanguard and those who are behind is getting wider, not smaller. So with all that in mind, I thought for this particular Long Read Sunday slash Weekend Big Think episode, it would be good to go out and check in on all those different surveys that I hadn't spent as much time with to pull out some of the more interesting numbers. So in no particular order, as researched by me with the assistance of both Fable and GPT 5.6 Seoul, here are some stats telling the story of AI right now, and frankly, the story that we don't always get on the AI Daily Brief. First up, a Gallup poll from mid-May found that 52 percent of US workers now use AI on the job. It was the first time that we had officially passed the halfway mark, and given that Gallup is going so broadly across all different types of workers, I think that 52 percent number is carrying a lot of weight. This is basically confirming in my mind that at this point, you just use AI on the job, and the question shift not to how much adoption is there, but how well is it being used. Numbers around ROI are a bit more complicated. A Domino Data Lab study found that while 93 percent of enterprises reported improved production capability, 57 percent of those enterprises said that AI's ROI still fails to outpace spend. PWC's mid-year CEO snapshot, which was fielded between mid-May and mid-June, saw 39 percent of CEOs reporting positive outcomes from AI so far, and I think this is meant to be specifically about measurable and tangible outcomes. And this is something you see come up a lot in these surveys. In many cases, we're in this weird hinterland where companies know the value of AI when they see it and know the value of AI on individual and small team levels, but it hasn't translated fully to the organizational level and into measurable bottom line impact. Another version of this story comes from the KPMG Global AI Pulse Survey, this one taken at the beginning of May, where only 7 percent of global leaders reported established ROI from AI, even though the percentage who said that AI was already delivering meaningful business value had jumped 12 points in a quarter up to 76 percent. So again, it's not that AI isn't valuable, it's that the translation all the way to bottom line impact is still very nascent. One story that we talk about a lot here that is now starting to show up in surveys, is concerns around cost. Even back at the beginning of May in an EY AI Pulse Survey, 98 percent of C-suite leaders indicated that token costs were forcing them to reconsider their AI plans. This is, of course, a byproduct of the shift to agentic AI where you are no longer thinking about AI in terms of number of seats that you are giving people times 20 or 30 bucks a month and instead thinking about the total cost of intelligence as expressed by used tokens which can get much, much higher. Now interestingly, alongside those 98 percent who say that token costs have forced them to reconsider their plans, only 64 percent of them, less than two-thirds, actually meter their usage. For anyone who is trying to figure out how to think about tokens and costs, I'll point you back to last week's long read Sunday episode with NewFar everything you need to know about AI tokens, which goes deep on all of this.