About one in four employed US adults, 26%, used a paid AI service for their job in the past week, Epoch AI said on 5 November, citing its October poll with Ipsos. That includes AI paid for by an employer, by the worker, or by both. Another 15% used only free versions, 3% were not sure who paid, and 55% did not use AI for work in the past week.
The poll was fielded on 9-11 October on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, a probability-based panel recruited by address-based sampling, and surveyed 2,015 US adults, 1,291 of them employed, according to Epoch. Results are weighted to US Census benchmarks. Epoch said it is the first of a new series of monthly polls.
About 1 in 4 US workers (26%) used a paid AI service for their job in the past week, according to our October poll. This includes AI paid for by their employer, by themselves, or by both.
Another 15% used only free versions, and 55% didnโt use AI for work at all in the pastโฆ pic.twitter.com/wHohobwhQG
Epoch AI posted the result at 17:08 UTC on 5 November: 26% of US workers used a paid AI service for their job in the past week, 15% used only free versions and 55% did not use AI for work.
Business Pill · Distribution Advantage
A short explainer on distribution advantage: why reaching buyers through an existing channel can matter as much as the product. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about this poll.
The key insight: 26% of employed US adults used paid AI for work in the past week and 15% used only free versions, Epoch AI’s October poll with Ipsos found. By our arithmetic on Epoch’s published data, employers paid, alone or with the worker, for 82% of the workers who used a paid service.
Epoch also published the answers behind the headline. Among the 574 employed respondents who used AI for work in the past seven days (unweighted count), 45.5% said their employer paid for or provided the AI, 10.7% paid for it themselves, 3.3% said both they and their employer paid, 34.0% used only free versions and 5.8% were not sure.
By our arithmetic, an employer paid, alone or with the worker, for 48.9% of these AI users. That is 82% of the 59.6% who used a paid service; workers paying on their own make up the other 18%.
The question asked: “Who paid for the AI service or services you used for work in the past 7 days? If you used both paid and free services, answer about the paid services.”
Who paid for the AI that US workers used for work in the past 7 days, among the 574 employed respondents who used AI for work, from the Epoch AI / Ipsos KnowledgePanel poll fielded 9-11 October 2026 (weighted). The employer segment combines ’employer paid or provided’ and ‘both employer and I paid’ (our arithmetic).
Share of employed US adults who used each AI service for work in the past 7 days (n=1,291), Epoch AI / Ipsos KnowledgePanel poll, 9-11 October 2026, weighted.
Respondents could pick more than one service. Copilot’s 14.9% and Gemini’s 15.5% sit within each other’s published 90% confidence intervals (13.3%-16.6% and 13.9%-17.3%), so the poll does not separate them.
Use was not occasional for many: of the workers who used AI for work, 33.4% did so on five or more of the past seven days, and 20.4% on one day.
The Business Lever: The Employer Is the Buyer
For the companies selling AI to workers, the poll says where the paid use comes from. In this sample, employers stand behind about four in five workers using paid AI on the job, by our arithmetic, so the decision to pay sits mostly with companies rather than with individual workers.
That makes company budgets the lever to watch. Our recent coverage shows employers and providers adjusting those budgets:
Epoch’s July 2026 wave of 1,103 employed US adults asked a different question: what type of subscription workers used most of the time when they used AI for work. Among those users, 46.7% named a free plan, 28.8% an employer-provided one, 12.8% a personal paid plan and 8.4% both employer and personal. Because the October question asks who paid and tells respondents to answer about the paid service if they used both, the two waves are not directly comparable, and we do not read them as a trend.
The Structural Read
As we read the data, the buyer of workplace AI is mostly the company: 45.5% of AI-using workers had employer-paid or employer-provided AI, against 10.7% who paid themselves.
As we read the service list, ChatGPT leads work use at 19.1% of employed adults, while Copilot (14.9%) and Gemini (15.5%) are not separated by the poll’s 90% intervals.
As we read the free tier, 34.0% of AI-using workers used only free versions, a pool that is not yet paying for workplace AI.
Epoch AI, 5 November 2026
“About 1 in 4 US workers (26%) used a paid AI service for their job in the past week, according to our October poll.”
Three Implications
FOR AI VENDORS In this poll, the paid workplace user is mostly bought by an employer, so company budgets, not individual sign-ups, carry most paid use.
FOR EMPLOYERS Employers already stand behind 48.9% of workers who use AI for work, by our arithmetic, which puts AI spending decisions on company budgets.
FOR THE NEXT POLLS Epoch says this is the first of a monthly series; the November wave is the first chance to see whether the 26% moves.
The framework says: “As companies move from chatbots to thousands of autonomous agentic workflows running 24/7, the line item that used to be a rounding error becomes the budget.”
As we read it, Epoch’s poll shows who signs for that line item today: employers paid for most of the paid AI that workers used. The framework itself does not discuss this poll.
What Is Not Established
The answers are self-reported and cover only the past seven days. The poll does not say how much anyone spent, which plan they used, or whether “employer provided” means a paid enterprise seat or a tool bundled into other software. Shares among AI users rest on 574 respondents, and every figure carries a margin of error; Epoch publishes 90% confidence intervals.
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In Epoch AI’s October poll, 26% of employed US adults used paid AI for work in the past week and 15% used only free versions. Among workers using AI, employers paid, alone or jointly, in 48.9% of cases: 82% of paid users, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. Figures are from Epoch AI’s post of 5 November 2026 and its published October and July 2026 poll data (Epoch AI / Ipsos KnowledgePanel, CC-BY). The 48.9%, 59.6%, 82% and 18% shares are our arithmetic on Epoch’s weighted percentages.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
