Deloitte AI Survey: 63% Use AI at Work, a Third Hide It

Most people at your office are already using AI. The odds are good that at least one of them is hiding it from the boss.

A new Deloitte AI survey of 25,000 UK workers finds that 63 percent of working adults between 18 and 70 knowingly use generative AI in their jobs, with almost a quarter relying on it every single day. But the rollout is not going the way anyone planned. Nearly a third of those AI users, 31 percent, say they use the tools without their employer's knowledge, a habit the industry calls "shadow AI." Only 28 percent of organizations have clear policies on how AI should be used, according to Deloitte's UK chief AI officer, who said in a LinkedIn video that "the question for leaders isn't whether AI is being used. It's whether their organisations are keeping up," as reported by LinkedIn News.

The promise of AI at work is that it saves time. The numbers do not quite back that up. Deloitte found the average worker saves about 70 minutes a week, but 31 percent of respondents said they used generative AI at work and saved no time at all. Almost one in three workers is running AI on company hours and getting nothing back. Across the whole survey, only about 30 percent of people said the tools saved them at least some time each week, and a tiny 7 percent saved five or more hours.

The time savings are real, but lopsided

The Deloitte AI survey, run by Ipsos with fieldwork between May 7 and June 10, 2026, is the largest single-country study of workplace generative AI use to date. The survey will repeat every six months, so this is the baseline, not the final word. And the baseline shows that the benefits are concentrated. In information and communications, 21 percent of workers save five or more hours a week. In healthcare and social work, that figure drops to 5 percent. The technology is the same. The jobs, the training, and the workflows are not.

Training looks like the weak link. Nearly half of generative AI users, 49 percent, have never had formal training on using the tools safely and effectively. The three most common uses are searching for information, drafting emails, and writing summaries, so for a big part of the workforce the technology is really just a slightly faster search engine. Two thirds of AI users, 65 percent, say their leadership has not given convincing guidance on how the tools should be used in the first place.

Workers are paying for AI out of their own pockets

Perhaps the strangest finding in the Deloitte AI survey is who is footing the bill. About 46 percent of generative AI users say they use free tools at work. But 17 percent pay for at least one tool themselves, out of their own money, and Deloitte estimates that adds up to £958 million a year in personal spending by UK workers, roughly $1.29 billion. People want the productivity boost badly enough to buy it themselves, because their employers are not providing it.

There is a reason many of them keep quiet about it. Almost a quarter of workers, 23 percent, say there is a stigma attached to using generative AI in the workplace, and 64 percent of weekly users are worried that managers will look at their output and conclude the AI could do their job. So they pay for the tools, hide the usage, and stress about getting caught. Hayley McKelvey, Deloitte UK's chief AI officer, put the fix plainly: "The organisations that will get the most value from AI are those that make responsible use visible, supported and part of everyday work," according to Deloitte's press release on the survey.

It is not just a UK story

The pattern repeats wherever researchers look. A separate BambooHR study released on September 1, 2026 found that American workers spend the equivalent of 47 workdays a year using AI, but roughly 20 of those days are lost to fixing the tool's errors and iterating on prompts, as reported by GlobeNewswire. That is more than two full working weeks spent debugging AI output. Yet 65 percent of those workers still describe themselves as confident and enthusiastic about the technology, and 58 percent say saving time is their main reason for using it. The enthusiasm is real. The time savings are, at best, uneven.

Put the two studies together and the picture is clear enough. AI has not replaced anyone's job yet, and it has not saved most people much time either. What it has done is create a parallel workflow: people quietly buying tools, learning by trial and error, and spending a meaningful slice of their workweek wrestling with prompts instead of doing the work the prompts are supposed to help with. The Deloitte AI survey numbers suggest the fix is boring but obvious. Companies that train their people and say out loud how AI should be used will get the productivity gains. The ones still treating it as a forbidden shortcut will keep paying for it in secret and getting half the value.

Until then, the AI revolution is mostly happening in incognito mode. Your coworkers are using it, your boss probably is too, and almost nobody is talking about it. For more on how AI is quietly rewriting the economics of everyday work, read about AI side hustle income doubling in a new survey and Google's Gemini AI accidentally hacking real companies, or see how workers adapted when the TikTok US deal changed their jobs overnight.