US Census data showed firm AI use rose from 3.7% to 5.4% in 2023-2024

Using the US Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, the working paper “Tracking Firm Use of AI in Real Time” (CES 24-16, March 2024) found that the share of US businesses using AI to produce goods or services rose from about 3.7 percent in September 2023 to about 5.4 percent by the end of February 2024, with firms expecting around 6.6 percent by fall 2024. Adoption varied enormously by sector, from a low near 1.4 percent in construction and agriculture to a high of 18.1 percent in the information sector. The survey reaches a sample of roughly 1.2 million employer businesses, making it one of the few nationally representative, near-real-time measures of how quickly businesses were actually adopting AI - low in absolute terms, but rising.