Federal Reserve Board Tracks U.S. AI Adoption Rates
The Federal Reserve ("Fed") analyzed trends in AI adoption in the U.S. through 2025. A key finding was the dominance of financial services and professional services — lawyers, consultants, and tech firms — which led every other industry by a significant margin.
In a FEDS Notes report, a Fed economist reported that the financial and professional services sectors sit at roughly 30% and 33% adoption respectively, well above the 18% economy-wide average. At the individual worker level: 63% of finance workers and 62% of professional services workers report using generative AI on the job. Financial services showed the strongest sustained momentum of any sector, growing at 127% year-over-year through September 2025. The economist concluded that AI is diffusing at the fastest rate through the industries built on cognitive, analytical, and knowledge work, the tasks large language models are most capable of assisting with.
The economist said the analysis was based on a review of three major surveys: (i) the Census Bureau's biweekly, firm-level Business Trends and Outlook Survey; (ii) the independent Real-Time Population Survey and (iii) the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Survey of Business Uncertainty. The economist cautioned that measuring AI adoption depended on the survey. The Census Bureau found 18% of businesses adopted AI, while 41% of individual workers said they use generative AI on the job, and 78% of workers are at firms that have adopted AI. The researcher said these differences reflected different methodologies. He said that surveys weighted toward small businesses (which dominate the U.S. firm landscape) produce lower numbers; surveys weighted by employment, or targeting senior leaders, produce higher ones.
The economist found that over 20% of firms planned to adopt AI in the first half of 2026. He noted that most workers who use AI do so for under an hour a week, and daily use remains a minority behavior. He questioned whether the enormous infrastructure investments now underway can be justified by actual economic returns.