LO
DeploymentCognitive automation2026-04-01
Census BTOS supplement: 18% of US firms used AI in a business function, and 57% of those in three functions or fewer
AI implementation leadoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2026-04-01
Evidence stage
DeploymentAn employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Tasks this bears on
Deciding what to try first
Looking at everything the company does, and picking the one or two places where a tool would actually change a number — rather than the places that demo well.
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backed
Getting people to actually use it
Sitting with the people whose work it changes, finding out why they went back to the old way, and fixing the reason rather than reminding them again.
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
All US firms, nationally representative; reference period Nov 2025 - Jan 2026. 18% firm-weighted, 32% employment-weighted, expected to reach 22% within six months; 50-60% (60-70% employment-weighted) for very large firms in Information, Professional Services and Finance. Among adopters, the most common functions are Sales and Marketing 52%, Strategy and Business Development 45%, IT 41%. This is a count of firms, not of occupations or of people: it says where AI entered a company, never which roles changed. Two further cautions the authors state themselves - the survey questions were revised between supplements, and 23% of firms report workers using AI in tasks against 18% firm-level adoption, so some use is arriving without a company decision at all.
What this means
For the first time this site can say how common the thing it documents actually is. Everything else in this base is one employer doing one thing; this is a nationally representative count of how many employers have done anything at all — 18% of firms, 32% of employment. It also says where AI lands when it lands: sales and marketing, strategy, IT, and rarely more than three functions at once. If your work sits in one of those three, the tool arriving is the normal case rather than a sign your company is unusual.
What it does not yet show
It does not say anything about jobs. A firm answering yes has AI somewhere in a business function; nobody asked which roles that function contains, whose tasks changed, or whether anyone's work got easier or narrower. The 18% also cannot be compared cleanly with earlier BTOS readings, because the question was rewritten from AI used in producing goods or services to AI used in any business function — a broader question collects a bigger number without anything having changed in the world.
What you can check
Ask inside your own company which business functions have bought or switched on an AI feature in the last six months, and count them. If the answer is more than three, you are at the leading edge of this distribution rather than behind it — which is the opposite of what most coverage will tell you.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 2 linked task judgements above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies (CES-WP-26-25) · verified 2026-09-12 · Claude (VOLO agent) — PDF downloaded and read in full; every figure quoted checked against the paper's own abstract and §5.2 · interpreted 2026-09-12 · Claude (VOLO agent)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.
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