While a rising majority of workers in the take a negative attitude toward AI in the workplace, others are welcoming the tech with open arms — even going so far as to pay for AI services out of their own pockets.
According to a recent workplace survey conducted by Deloitte and flagged by Reuters, workers in the UK are spending a collective $1.3 billion annually on generative AI for their jobs, without even expensing it. The survey is based on responses from 25,000 workers across the continent, which Deloitte calls the “largest study of workplace GenAI use conducted in a single country.”
Overall, the AI adoption rate in UK workplaces is massive, with 63 percent of working adults reporting that they actively use generative AI for work. Though the polling methods aren’t an exact match, we can compare that to a similarly-timed survey of US workers by Gallup, which suggests that 52 percent of American workers use AI in some capacity, though only 15 percent do so daily.
In the UK, nearly half of the workers surveyed said they use free AI tools, while 34 percent said they used generative AI provided by their employers. Still, one in six workplace AI users reported paying for at least one kind of tool themselves — the cohort collectively spending over $1 billion on AI every year.
Despite their obvious enthusiasm for the technology, the Deloitte survey found UK workers’ actual deployment of generative AI remains pretty shallow. Rather than chasing cutting-edge autonomous agents — which are not always the most efficient choice, to be fair — British workers are using AI for surface-level tasks like pumping out emails, or as a replacement for once-reliable search engines (a method one CEO likened to lobbing “slop grenades” around the office.)
As partner and head of industry insight at Deloitte UK Paul Lee said in the report, “what’s particularly striking is how quickly GenAI has become part of everyday working life. Yet for many workers its role remains relatively basic, focused on searching for information and drafting content rather than supporting more complex work.”
“The story here isn’t that workers are using GenAI,” Lee concluded, but that “they are using it despite limited training, patchy guidance and, in some cases, without their employer’s knowledge.”
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