American firms are quickly outpacing their international counterparts at getting their employees to use AI. As reward for their efforts, they are also running up a monstrous bill, with lavish outlays on token costs, proprietary AI platforms, and just plain goofs, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Corporate America has set itself a goal to comprehensively integrate AI across its employees’ workflows, and by some measures, their efforts have been a wild success. Around half of U.S. workers now use AI in their roles at least a few times a year, up from less than 40% a year ago, according to recent Gallup polling.
The rate of adoption has outpaced that of rival firms abroad, according to research from the Brookings Institution published in March, which found 43% of U.S. workers now use AI on the job, compared to 32% among their European counterparts. The gap holds at the firm level, too, with 7% of U.S. companies now using AI for production of goods and services compared to just just 4% of European firms.
Bosses have been under pressure to figure out how they can turn AI tools and experiments into profits. And while AI usage has in most cases yet to translate to an acceptable return on investment, the technology is starting to show up in productivity statistics—albeit modestly. The Brookings research found differences in AI use led to aggregate time savings worth 2.3% of working hours in the U.S. versus 1.4% in Europe.
