AI’s Uneven Gains Put U.S. Jobs and Workers in Focus
Workers who use AI regularly report faster task completion and more creative solutions, but access to those benefits varies. A study by Gallup, Jobs for the…
As employers bring artificial intelligence into daily work, access to its reported gains remains uneven across the U.S. workforce. A study found that workers who regularly use AI often complete tasks faster, but college graduates and managers are more likely to use it than workers in other roles, raising questions about who benefits as jobs change.
The American Job Quality Study, produced by Gallup, Jobs for the Future and The Families & Workers Fund, found that 63% of workers who had used AI at work said it helped them work faster. Another 56% said it helped them find more creative solutions to work tasks.
The study gathered data from January through March. Nearly half of respondents said AI helped them spend more time on the most interesting parts of their jobs, while 46% said it helped them produce higher-quality work.
The gains vary sharply by how often employees use the technology. Among regular users, 79% said AI helped them complete tasks faster, compared with 37% of irregular users. Regular users were also more likely to report benefits in creative problem-solving, work quality and time spent on interesting tasks.
That gap matters for jobs because workers who do not have regular access to AI may miss out on reported productivity and quality gains. The study does not establish that AI caused differences in job quality, but its findings show that use is concentrated among groups already more likely to hold higher-quality roles.
“The benefits are not being shared evenly, they're not reaching all workers,” Molly Blankenship, associate vice president of strategy and impact at Jobs for the Future, told FOX Business. She helped lead the study.
College graduates were more than twice as likely as workers without a degree to use AI daily or weekly: 40% compared with 17%. The study also found that 37% of managers were regular users, against 25% of individual workers.
Blankenship said the education gap in AI use tracks with differences in job quality. College graduates are more likely to hold what the study describes as quality jobs, she said. Workers in higher-quality jobs are also more likely to report satisfaction and less likely to intend to leave, according to her account of the research.
“If we've got people who are more satisfied, more able to complete their tasks, more able to focus on the interesting parts, etc., then that's a good thing and a thing we need to promote and make as widely accessible as possible,” Blankenship said. She added that some workers are not getting the same chance to benefit.
The findings come alongside a more mixed picture among software developers. A Stack Overflow survey shared with CNN found that 65% of respondents use coding assistants or agents, yet six in 10 said they try to avoid using AI. The survey included responses from 30,000 developers in 169 countries.
Software engineer Laura Housh, who began using AI for coding and other tasks in 2024, told CNN she sees some value in it but finds it lacks the context needed to be truly useful. Developers also described pressure to learn new tools, uncertainty about which tasks may be automated and concerns that relying on AI can make it harder to understand the code they are changing.
“People have to completely retool their jobs, and so it is quite unnerving for folks to know exactly how much of what they’re doing will be automated,” Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told CNN.
The study’s figures point to a divide within the workforce: 40% of college graduates use AI daily or weekly, compared with 17% of workers without a degree.
Source: foxbusiness.com
