Generative AI Usage Doubles Across Industries
Key Points
- A recent Wharton longitudinal study shows weekly generative‑AI usage among business leaders jumping from 37% in 2023 to 72% in 2024, indicating a near‑doubling in just one year.
- The increase is consistent across functions: purchasing/procurement rose from 50% to 94%, product/engineering from 40% to 78%, management from 26% to 69%, and marketing from 20% to 62%.
- Adoption is highest in smaller firms (≈$50 M‑$1 B revenue), with about 80% of employees using AI weekly, while large enterprises (> $2 B) show lower usage and tighter controls.
- Roughly three‑quarters of employees at the biggest companies report substantial restrictions on AI use, whereas half of all organizations overall allow relatively unrestricted access.
- These findings suggest that the prior baseline assumption of ~1/3 employee AI usage is outdated; a new baseline closer to two‑thirds is more realistic, and the growth rate surpasses historic tech adoption curves like the internet or email.
Full Transcript
# Generative AI Usage Doubles Across Industries **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVKpIOZWmK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVKpIOZWmK0) **Duration:** 00:08:04 ## Summary - A recent Wharton longitudinal study shows weekly generative‑AI usage among business leaders jumping from 37% in 2023 to 72% in 2024, indicating a near‑doubling in just one year. - The increase is consistent across functions: purchasing/procurement rose from 50% to 94%, product/engineering from 40% to 78%, management from 26% to 69%, and marketing from 20% to 62%. - Adoption is highest in smaller firms (≈$50 M‑$1 B revenue), with about 80% of employees using AI weekly, while large enterprises (> $2 B) show lower usage and tighter controls. - Roughly three‑quarters of employees at the biggest companies report substantial restrictions on AI use, whereas half of all organizations overall allow relatively unrestricted access. - These findings suggest that the prior baseline assumption of ~1/3 employee AI usage is outdated; a new baseline closer to two‑thirds is more realistic, and the growth rate surpasses historic tech adoption curves like the internet or email. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVKpIOZWmK0&t=0s) **Rapid Rise in Workplace AI Adoption** - A Wharton longitudinal study reveals that weekly generative‑AI use among department leaders has more than doubled across all functions, jumping from roughly one‑third to two‑thirds of employees, prompting a needed revision of baseline AI usage assumptions. ## Full Transcript
it is really important that we update
our priors update our assumptions about
generative AI regularly as the data
warrants in this case it's a big deal we
have a giant jump in weekly usage of AI
reported by Wharton business school they
did a longitudinal study of the same
people from 23 and 24 and what they came
back with is a jump from 37% usage once
a week last year in 2023 to to 72% usage
once a week this year these people are
uh leading departments at businesses
ranging from $50 million in size all the
way up past two
billion and so they got to get a sense
of the department level usage for these
generative AI
tools and what you see is that same
doubling pattern repeated across the
board purchasing and procurement 50%
usage last year 99 no 94% usage this
year 94 still stuning uh product and
Engineering 40% usage last year up to
78% usage this year management up from
26 to 69% this year marketing up from 20
to 62% this year it's a really
consistent lift across the board and we
probably should update our Baseline
assumptions around how many people are
using AI at work the starter Assumption
of it being a third is probably
inaccurate at this point is probably
closer to
2/3 now you might be wondering do these
two-thirds of people have controls can
they just do whatever they want well
anecdotally I've been hearing that they
can just do whatever they want and half
of orgs report that roughly and that is
more distributed towards smaller
businesses larger businesses tend to
have controls which is what I've heard
as well so that one's not too much of a
surprise
one of the things that that is
interesting to me is that I see that the
adoption and usage is actually led by
smaller businesses this time so
businesses uh between $50 million and uh
on up toward a billion dollars
are 80% usage that I I'm a little bit
surprised but like basically they they
cross tabed they cut the average usage
once a week and they said well how does
that split out by business size and
businesses that are smaller are at 80%
usage and businesses that are that are
much larger that are in the Enterprise
range above $2 billion they have lower
usage rates and that comes back through
in the number of permissions required to
use generative AI like you see that if
you are an Enterprise it is actually
much less likely that you can use AI
with no
restrictions uh and in fact roughly 3/4
of people at larger businesses above $2
billion report substantial restrictions
on their ability to use
Ai and
so what's my takea away from all this
well the first place I go and look I I
I'm not too surprised that you are just
growing the top line numbers ey popping
doubling in a year is a lot uh we never
really saw that with uh internet with
email like we didn't have this kind of
growth even though it was really
exciting
growth but I look at the activities what
are people actually spending their time
doing with generative Ai and that's sort
of where I go for understanding what's
happening and most people are doing
pretty basic stuff so document editing
64% a little bit of analysis
62% and summarizing documents
59% these are ABC use cases for
generative AI they're not super fancy
and that means that there's a lot of
room left for the larger corporations
for smaller corporations to figure out
that generative AI can do a whole lot
more for them than just edit their
docs and I don't think people
necessarily know that and I think one of
the things that this study doesn't get
at effectively
is how do you
measure adoption of more complex
workflows or
building you know tool chains that
enable larger and uh more complicated
work to be done the other thing that
this study doesn't really get at is to
what extent these organizations are
building AI Solutions into their product
and I think that's deliberate and I
think the reason it's deliberate is
because their study is Broad and in many
cases if you are
making bolts if you are making uh rug
Cutters if you are
making anything that's physical it's not
necessarily going to be wrapped into
your product and if you want a wider
survey of Business Leaders you're going
to have to wrap in folks beyond the
software business and so if you're doing
that it doesn't really make sense to say
hey generative AI are you building
generative AI into your latest rug rug
cutter right like that's that's not
going to
happen Okay but they're still just using
this for simple things and to me that
represents a opportunity for people to
help folks understand what is in the box
when it comes to Ai and how big that
space is and how much there is uh that
you can build and unlock what's
interesting is leaders
recognize that training is needed one of
the things that they said they would
substantially increase investment in was
training their teams for generative AI
but I think one of the challenges is
that they don't really yet know what to
train in if you dig into the cross tabs
there's not really an understanding of
what generative AI training should
include and I think that's a big
opportunity for Consultants I think it's
a big opportunity to set the table and
say this is what's needed for generative
AI
fluency um and I think it's one of the
things that I will be really curious to
see if they do the survey again next
year because I would expect the
sophistication of usage to go up uh I
would expect more complicated uh
workflows to be mentioned more
frequently and I would expect that uh
generative AI training would be
something that people understand better
like glad people are enthusiastic I'm
glad they want a budget for it don't get
me wrong but we need to know what we're
asking for we need to know what we're
training to to be effective and I think
that's really shown one last takeaway
90% of firms are leading AI internally
and that's really split half of them are
saying they're leading AI with multiple
teams half with one
team but the Consultants are not leading
the AI strategy here and that's
something that's really really clear
when you look through the report the
Consultants just are uh there to help
there to assist but not necessarily
there to take the lead organizations
seem to view it as really important that
they own this uh and half of the ones
surveyed have a chief AI officer so that
is a real job title I'd wondered how
much of a real job title it was but
based on self reports it's a real job
title and it's growing quickly so we're
going to see probably AI departments as
as well is something that I would expect
and that's an interesting job family
shift we will see all right that is the
Wharton study I will link it here in the
YouTube I think it's worth a look
because I want it to update my thinking
I want it to update your thinking on
where AI actually is at in businesses
because it shapes how we build software
it shapes how we think about the
products we launch it shapes how we
understand who we would expect to know
about AI versus who we would not expect
to know about I okay there you go
Wharton study I'll link it