Nearly 70% of workers use AI regularly now – but many get no time to upskill

A new Workera report found that 67.8% of employees now use AI tools beyond ChatGPT at least a couple of days a week, up from 39.9% last year, according to the 2026 State of Skills Intelligence Report published Sept. 23. The survey covered 1,000 salaried professionals at organizations with 5,000 or more employees in the US, conducted in July 2026 using Pollfish, with year-over-year comparisons to a similar March 2025 survey.

The report, covered by ZDNET, found that 80% of companies feel they are more likely to be on track for an AI-enabled future in 2026, up from 67% last year. But obstacles remain: 56.4% of employees said no time is allocated during work hours for upskilling, and 42.5% cited a lack of relevant learning materials. Over 80% of employees (84.3%) spend five hours or less per week on training. Nearly 6 in 10 employees said they have been offered AI-specific training opportunities in the last 12 months.

Workera founder and CEO Kian Katanforoosh told ZDNET that leaders should give people time and psychological safety to experiment with AI. He said AI upskilling can feel overwhelming, and that the learning landscape has shifted from adoption and access toward outcomes and actions.

Just under half of employees (46.5%) said they used tools not provided by their employer for skill development; of those, 74.6% used mainstream AI tools including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Almost 80% of respondents (76.6%) believed they can do their job better than AI, and only 9.5% said an AI agent could do more than half of their job effectively today. Just 7% said AI can already evaluate skills better than humans, while 38.5% said AI will never surpass humans at assessing skills.

About two-fifths (41.1%) said they would opt into a continuous skills measurement tool like Workera's Ambient if they owned the data and controlled what is shared, while 31.2% were undecided. Ambient is being piloted with over 10,000 signups on its waitlist.