A U.S. Census Bureau working paper observes AI on three scales — business, function, task — and finds a focus on a few functions.
This working paper from the Center for Economic Studies of the U.S. Census Bureau examines the diffusion of artificial intelligence at three interlocking levels: adoption by the company, deployment within functions, and use at the task level of employees. It is based on a supplement devoted to AI from the nationally representative Business Trends and Outlook Survey collected from November 2025 to January 2026.
Over the period, 18% of companies say they use AI in at least one function — a share that rises to 32% when weighted by employment, a sign that adoption is concentrated in large organizations. Among very large companies in information, professional services and finance, the rates reach 50 to 60%, and 60 to 70% in employment-weighting.
The most interesting result concerns the narrowness of integration: even among adopters, use remains limited to sales, marketing, strategy and IT. On the employment side, workforce reductions attributed to AI remain rare — 2% of companies — the majority say they use it to augment existing work rather than replace it, even if functional integration is statistically correlated with workforce reductions.
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