Featured
Data
Apr. 9, 2026
Newsletter
Jul. 17, 2025
Newsletter
Feb. 6, 2026
AI tools now reach hundreds of millions of people, but reliable data on who is using them and how remains scarce. Who is using AI, how, and for what? These questions only grow more important as AI capabilities advance faster than benchmarks can measure. Epoch tracks this through original polling and research, examining how AI is being adopted, what is driving or limiting uptake, and how access to frontier capabilities is changing.
We surveyed over 2,000 Americans on how they use AI at work: who uses it, how much, which services, and whether it's replacing or creating tasks.
These benchmarks track a wide range of digital work. Progress will correlate with economic utility, but tasks are too self-contained to indicate full automation.
Beyond benchmarks as leading indicators for task automation
Public data as well as our original polling suggest LLM adoption is roughly on trend, but the underlying drivers are shifting.
OpenAI has the inference compute to deploy tens of millions of digital workers, but only on a narrow set of tasks – for now.
How quickly has AI been diffusing through the economy?
We compare open and closed AI models, and study how openness has evolved. The best open model today is on par with closed models in performance and training compute, but with a lag of about one year.
Economists have proposed several different approaches to predicting AI automation of economically valuable tasks. There is vast disagreement between different approaches and no clear winner.