Most Workers Now Use AI — But Get No Time to Learn It
Your boss expects AI skills, but won't give you hours to learn them.
AI has quietly stopped being a novelty at the office. A new survey of 1,000 US professionals at large companies found that 67.8% now use AI tools beyond ChatGPT at least a couple of days a week — up from just under 40% a year ago. That's a jump of nearly 30 percentage points in twelve months. Meanwhile, 80% of companies say they feel on track for an AI-enabled future, up from 67% last year.
But the people actually doing the work aren't getting much help. More than half of employees (56.4%) say no time is set aside during work hours for learning new skills, and 42.5% say the learning materials they're given aren't relevant to their jobs. Over 80% spend five hours or less per week on any training at all. Companies are offering more AI courses than before — nearly six in ten workers have been offered something — but offering a course is not the same as giving someone the hours, tools, or encouragement to finish it.
The result is a quiet form of self-reliance. Just under half of employees (46.5%) say they've used AI tools their employer never approved for learning on their own, and of those, about three-quarters reached for mainstream tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of the skills-tracking company Workera, which ran the study, says leaders need to explicitly carve out learning time. "Don't think that they will just figure it out without you," he told ZDNET, adding that time off for learning also gives people permission to experiment without fear of failure.
That last point matters most. The survey's real message isn't that workers are lazy or resistant — it's that they're stressed and squeezed. The pace of AI change keeps accelerating, and the gap between what employers expect and what they actually resource is widening. Companies that solve this first will have a workforce that can genuinely use AI; the rest will have employees quietly teaching themselves at night, or quietly falling behind.
- About 68% of workers now use AI at least a couple of days a week, up from 40% a year ago.
- 56% of employees say they get no paid work time to learn AI skills, and 43% say the training materials don't fit their job.
- Almost half of workers are quietly learning on unapproved tools like ChatGPT and Claude because their employer's options aren't enough.
Why It Matters
Expecting AI skills without giving people time to learn them pushes training into unpaid hours and widens workplace gaps.