Executives Use AI More Than Their Workers Do
CIO Dive, Wednesday, October 7th, 2026
Survey: 53% of executives use generative AI vs. 38% of workers, and bosses are 2.7x likelier to use agentic AI.
A survey of 7,675 American adults found 53.2% of executives and business owners use generative AI compared with 37.9% of other workers, and executives are 2.7 times more likely to use agentic AI (17.5% versus 6.6%).
Leaders are moving from AI-as-search toward AI-assisted creation and knowledge work while much of the workforce has not followed, and a notable subset admit they pretend to know more about AI than they do.
Executives are no more willing than others to let bots handle high-stakes customer service, with about three-quarters preferring a live human.