The delegation has quietly begun. A new survey from Epoch AI and Ipsos finds that 20 percent of employed Americans now hand off at least one work task to AI that previously went to a coworker or outside contractor. The researchers interviewed 1,106 employed adults in July 2026, asking about ten common knowledge-work tasks drawn from Department of Labor data. Every single task showed some level of AI adoption.
Software development leads the pack, with 57 percent of workers who code using AI assistance. Data analysis follows at 46 percent, and reading work documents at 39 percent. Record-keeping brings up the rear at just 25 percent. But before anyone panics about robots taking over, the data tells a more modest story: workers mostly describe AI as partial support, not a replacement. Full or near-full task completion by AI cracks 10 percent only in software development and stays under 7 percent everywhere else.
The time savings are real but uneven. When AI handles only part of a task, workers report saving time on 37 percent of those tasks. When AI does most or all of the work, that jumps to 53 percent. Yet roughly one in six AI-assisted tasks actually takes longer than before—researchers suspect the back-and-forth of prompting and reviewing eats up whatever time the AI saves, or workers simply reinvest freed time into doing the work more thoroughly. That tracks with what we’ve seen in other industries: the tool changes the workflow, not just the output.
Two-thirds of AI output gets used with little or no editing, which raises an uncomfortable question about quality control. Only 6 percent of output is used completely unchanged, while 5 percent gets heavily reworked. The researchers are careful to note that low editing effort doesn’t prove the output is good—workers might accept mediocre results because fixing them costs more than living with them. Compare this to Gallup’s August 2025 finding that 45 percent of US workers use AI on the job, and a pattern emerges: adoption is broad but shallow. The machines are in the building. They’re just not running the show yet.
