One in five US workers now delegates tasks to AI instead of colleagues, survey finds

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An Epoch AI/Ipsos survey of 1,106 employed US adults (conducted July 10-19, 2026) finds that one in five US workers now hands off at least one task to AI that a human previously handled. The survey covered ten common work tasks drawn from US Department of Labor data. AI adoption is highest in software development (57% of workers using AI for that task), data analysis (46%), and reading work documents (39%), with record-keeping seeing the least adoption at 25%. When AI handles most or all of a task, workers report saving time in 53% of cases — versus 37% when AI provides only partial support. But one in six AI-assisted tasks takes longer than before. Full or near-full task completion by AI is rare: only 10% in software development, below 7% in all other categories. Task substitution (AI taking over tasks humans used to do) shows up most clearly in data analysis (7.1% of respondents) and reading work documents (5.7%). Epoch AI notes this doesn't automatically mean full worker displacement. The survey highlights that AI adoption is broad but shallow — most workers use AI as partial aid rather than a full replacement, and efficiency gains are real but not universal.