LO
DeploymentCognitive automation2026-04-01
Census BTOS supplement: 16% of AI-using US firms replaced existing software or equipment with AI-integrated solutions
Business systems owneroccupation 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
Shaping the process inside the system
Turning how the business actually works into stages, fields, rules and permissions — and deciding what the system will refuse to let someone do.
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backed
Deciding what the system may decide alone
Which actions the automation takes without a person — assigning an owner, scoring a lead, sending a message, closing a record — and what happens when it is unsure.
New task✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
All US firms, nationally representative; reference period Nov 2025 - Jan 2026. The 16% is of AI-using firms, not of all firms. The survey asks the firm what it replaced; it does not identify which system, which vendor, or who administered it, so nothing here says a particular CRM or order system was swapped. Read beside the same survey's labour figures rather than instead of them: among AI-using firms 95% report no AI-related employment change at all, with increases 2.3% and decreases 2.0% (firm-weighted), while among firms that substitute tasks with AI the share reporting a large number of replaced tasks rose from 2.5% to 7% since the first supplement - a rise the authors caution may partly reflect changes to the surrounding survey questions, though the wording of the task-replacement question itself stayed the same.
What this means
In the same survey, 16% of AI-using firms report swapping software or equipment for an AI-integrated version, against 2.3% reporting AI-related employment increases and 2.0% decreases. The visible substitution so far is one vendor's product for another's, and the person whose work that lands on is whoever owns the system it replaces: the process you configured, the rules you wrote and the boundary you set around automatic actions all move to a platform that ships its own versions of them.
What it does not yet show
Replacing a system is not the same as replacing the person who ran it, and this survey counts only the first. It does not say what happened to the configuration work afterwards, whether the new platform needed more of it or less, or whether anyone lost a job. Nor does it name a category of software: equipment is in the same question as software, so a manufacturer swapping a machine and a company swapping a CRM answer identically.
What you can check
Look at the last platform migration your company made and count the rules and automations that had to be rebuilt rather than imported. That number is the part of this job the new system did not bring with it, and it is the number a vendor's migration plan is least likely to have quoted 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 2026-10-16 · Claude (COO), interpretation audit 2026-10-16
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.
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