Thirty-one percent of workers who use artificial intelligence said their employer had asked them to take on more responsibilities. Meanwhile, 52 percent of all employees said they had less influence over technology adoption than they wanted. The figures put the workplace bargain at the center of AI’s expansion: workers report faster output, but the studies don’t establish that added work brings greater authority or pay.
Who Gets the Productivity Gains
Among U.S. employees who had used AI at work at least a few times in the past year, 63 percent said it helped them complete tasks faster, according to the American Job Quality Study, a partnership between Jobs for the Future, The Families and Workers Fund and Gallup. Another 46 percent said it helped them produce higher-quality work, while 47 percent said it let them spend more time on the most interesting parts of their jobs.
Whether faster work leads to more rewarding tasks, learning or another assignment depends on employers’ decisions, the article said. For workers already using AI, the possibility of more responsibility sits alongside an open question: will employers reward those contributions with greater authority or compensation?
AI access remains uneven. Forty percent of college graduates used AI at least weekly, compared with 17 percent of employees without a college degree. Managers were more likely than individual contributors to use it regularly. Use was concentrated among remote workers.
Among regular users, 52 percent held jobs that met the study’s multidimensional job-quality criteria, compared with 32 percent of employees who never used AI. The study said that doesn’t show AI created better jobs: more educated employees and managers are both more likely to hold quality jobs and use AI. The author also cautioned against treating an advantage among current users as evidence that giving everyone a chatbot would close the gap.
A working paper co-authored with Bureau of Economic Analysis economists Tina Highfill and Jon Samuels found that industries in states with higher worker-reported AI use in 2025 and 2026 had stronger output growth since 2020. The relationship was clearer for output than employment. Employment estimates were less precise, but they were still present.
Who Controls Deployment
A separate study followed more than 30,000 employees through the Gallup Workforce Panel. It found that workers who reported a clear organizational AI strategy were substantially more likely to use AI frequently, even after accounting for demographics and other workplace perceptions. Among frequent users, greater trust in leadership was associated with larger self-reported productivity gains.
Christos A. Makridis, an associate research professor at Arizona State University and a senior researcher at Gallup, said employers should provide paid time to learn and test approved tools on actual job tasks. Managers, he said, should explain permitted uses, how they’ll check outputs and how responsibilities could change. Training should include frontline workers, not only volunteers for AI pilots. Employees should also be able to flag errors or question proposed uses without being labeled resistant to innovation.
Security Risks Across Company Systems
Censys found nearly 268,000 internet-facing systems running 44 AI-related products as of July, up from roughly 164,000 in October 2025, a 63 percent increase in nine months. The systems include software connecting AI models to databases, corporate applications and other services. Many tools connect AI applications to sensitive corporate data, potentially giving hackers entry points into company systems.
Censys found nearly 114,000 internet-facing deployments of n8n, a workflow automation platform that can connect AI agents to other applications and services. Roughly 77,000 ran software versions affected by at least one recently disclosed critical vulnerability. Researchers also found more than 54,000 exposed control panels for OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that users can connect to personal accounts and other services. The findings don’t establish whether anyone could actually exploit the deployments.
The Justice Department said Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested and charged after allegedly installing an audio recording device in an OpenAI office in San Francisco. OpenAI said it found the device and referred the matter to the FBI. The company said there was no evidence Alfozan accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data; OpenAI terminated him.
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team warned in a report published Monday that smaller AI models may be only months away from independently spreading across internet-connected household devices. Researchers demonstrated a model running across 15 inexpensive Android TV boxes. They said they hadn’t demonstrated a fully autonomous AI worm operating in the real world.