Survey of Business Uncertainty

The Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) is a joint project of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, measuring business expectations and economic uncertainty. Its late-2025 AI adoption finding — 78% of the US workforce is employed at firms that use AI — was the highest figure in the three-way comparison published by the Federal Reserve Board on 3 April 2026. The 78% figure is employment-weighted: it asks what share of the labour force works at a firm that has adopted AI, meaning a large AI-using employer counts for all of its workers.

The 78% figure does not mean 78% of workers personally use AI tools; it means 78% of employed Americans work inside an AI-using firm. The information sector leads at 37% firm adoption, with professional services and financial services each near 30%. Daily AI use across the full workforce sits at 12%; weekly use at 35.2%. The SBU employment-weighted methodology is the broadest measure because it captures workforce exposure to AI without requiring active individual use — a worker at a large bank using AI in its trading operations is counted even if that worker's own job has not changed.

For labour-market analysis the SBU's 78% is arguably the most important of the three federal figures, because AI's workforce impact runs through the firms workers are employed by — through changed hiring, changed job requirements, and changed wage premia — rather than through individual tool use alone. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab analysis, which found AI suppressing roughly 1 million annual hires, is implicitly consistent with a world where 78% of the workforce is inside AI-using firms but most have not yet seen their individual roles automated.