While AI might be a popular workplace companion for Tech Brew readers, the vast majority of those who responded to a recent survey aren’t shelling out any money for these tools.
About 78% of the 878 readers we surveyed said they don’t pay anything for AI tools overall, 16% allot $1 to $20 per month, and 5% budget more than that. A little over half of these office workers have some form of AI provided to them at work—whether through customized internal tools (23%) or third-party enterprise platforms (30%)—but a plurality (38%) use AI independently on the job.
Business owners/entrepreneurs and freelancers/contractors were much more likely to pay for AI tools—43% and 31%, respectively, paid from a dollar to more than $20 per month—suggesting that other employees might have a workplace footing the bill.
At least one respondent mentioned cost as a roadblock to adoption: “I think one of the big time savers is note-taking at work. But since it costs money, the company only has limited licenses for a few folks,” one respondent at a large company told us.
Common coworker: Tech Brew readers as a whole are big users of AI at work. Around 69% reported turning to AI tools (26% sometimes, 32% often, 11% always). Only 18% say they never use it, while 13% tap it rarely.
Like other surveys on the subject have found, there’s also an age gap here. Respondents aged 18–24 were the highest-frequency users (those who reported tapping it “often” or “always”). And the portion of those aged 18–44 who used AI at least “sometimes” was between 75% and 77%. That number dropped off slightly in higher age groups, hovering between 69% and 70%.
One Gen Z respondent said AI helped him sound more professional at work. “As a young professional, I’ve had to learn how to make sure I sound like I didn’t just start in the last year,” he wrote. “Using AI has helped me a lot with rewriting things to sound more professional instead of sitting there looking at an email for too long wondering if I sound like a child or not.”
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What’s the use: Our readers in advertising and marketing (48 responses) and corporate services (29) were the two industries with the most pervasive use. In both categories, more than 90% reported using AI at least sometimes, though these are admittedly small sample pools.
Our biggest chunk of readership belonged, unsurprisingly, to the computer and technology industry (193 people), 78% of whom use AI (27% sometimes, 39% often, 12% always).
ChatGPT, Microsoft and GitHub Copilots, Adobe’s various AI tools, Jira, and Perplexity were among the AI tools mentioned multiple times in response to a question about the one biggest time-saving use.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tech-industry heavy readership, coding assistants were also mentioned frequently (14% said they used them in the last 90 days.) Most of these mentions were positive, but there were some concerns about output quality.
“AI coding assistants point me in the right direction, but the code they generate is mostly not production-ready,” one mixed appraisal read. “When they point me in the wrong direction, they can cost me more time than they save.”
Beyond that, many of the responses touched on written communications, brainstorming and research, run-of-the-mill copywriting, and other busywork-type tasks. Around 35% said they’d used AI for meeting transcription and summarization, for instance.
“One standout use is automating repetitive tasks through tools like AI-driven workflows and generative automation,” one respondent wrote.