How Are People Using AI In The UK? 2024 Stats

AI is nothing new. But what is new is the rate at which adoption is increasing in 2023.

The past few months have seen millions of people trying their hand at using platforms like ChatGPT.

They use it to increase their workplace efficiency and, let’s be honest, take a few shortcuts where possible.

But how big is AI in 2023? Are we, in the UK, worried about it taking our jobs?

We’ve got all the numbers in our 2023 roundup of AI statistics. Let’s dive in.

AI Usage at Work – The Statistics

In June 2023, we polled 2,009 people in the UK (demographically representative, supplied by a market research company).

We asked:

• Which of the following statements around AI and your job, if any, most applies to you? (Select best match)

We gave the following response options:

• I have used AI at work and I AM worried about AI taking my job
• I have used AI at work but I am NOT worried about AI taking my job
• I have not used AI at work but I AM worried about AI taking my job
• I have not used AI at work and I am NOT worried about AI taking my job
• N/A – I do not currently have a job

33.7% of those polled selected that they do not currently have a job. We removed those from our dataset, which left us with 1,332 currently employed people in the UK aged 16 or over. From those 1,332 people, here’s how they answered:

Which of the following statements around AI and your job, if any, most applies to you? (Select best match)
Response	% of Respondents
I have used AI at work and I AM worried about AI taking my job	10.21%
I have used AI at work but I am NOT worried about AI taking my job	27.18%
I have not used AI at work but I AM worried about AI taking my job	20.95%
I have not used AI at work and I am NOT worried about AI taking my job	41.67%

 

 

So 31.16% of people in the UK are worried about AI taking their jobs.

37.39% have used AI in their job.

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We see considerable differences by age though.

If we group responses into whether or not a person has used AI or not and segment by age, we can see notable trends.

Number of People Who Have used AI at Work
Age Group	% of Respondents Who Have Used AI At work
16 to 24	56.04%
25 to 34	45.88%
35 to 44	36.26%
45 to 54	35.02%
55+	22.61%

Essentially, the younger an employee is, the likelier they are to have used AI at work.

Of those aged 16 – 24 with jobs, over half of them have now used AI at work (56.04%).

There are regional variations in AI usage at work as well.

We can hypothesise on some of these variations being down to the demographics of the people living and working in those regions or even on the prominence of industries where AI may have more obvious direct use cases.

But whatever the reason, the differences are quite prominent and make for interesting reading:

Number of People Who Have used AI at Work
Region	% of Respondents Who Have Used AI At work
East of England	29.84%
Greater London	47.90%
East Midlands	33.68%
West Midlands	37.60%
North East	31.74%
North West	40.58%
Northern Ireland	30.61%
Scotland	38.55%
South East	31.15%
South West	31.68%
Wales	39.21%
Yorkshire and the Humber	45.65%

At the highest usage end of the spectrum

47.90% employed people in London have used AI in their jobs. It falls as low as 29.84% in the East of England.

Are We Worried About AI Taking Our Jobs?

So how concerned are we about AI taking our jobs?

Well, across all UK respondents who work, just 31.3% reported being worried about AI taking their job.

But we again see considerable differences when we break the data down by age.

Number of People Who Are Worried About AI Taking their Job
Age Group	% of Respondents Who Are Worried About AI Taking their Job
16 to 24	40.10%
25 to 34	30.47%
35 to 44	33.97%
45 to 54	29.03%
55+	c

 

What we see here is that the youngest age group of workers (16 to 24s) are the ones most concerned about their jobs being taken by AI.

Interestingly this is also the age group who are most likely to be using AI in their jobs, meaning we could hypothesise that they’re the ones most aware of the capabilities of this quickly advancing and emerging technology.

Ultimately though, as the use of AI powered technologies becomes more and more prominent, we can expect to see more usage at work and perhaps more concern about human filled roles being replaced by such tech.

A great example of AI usage at work is with Excel. Sophisticated tools can help people build formulas! We reviewed and ranked 10 Excel AI tools to help people make a choice!

The Most in Demand AI Tools

Without doubt, the most significant breakthrough in mainstream access to AI tech has been through OpenAI.

Their ChatGPT offering has been one of the most talked about AI platforms of the year by far.

But it’s not the only AI powered tool seeing huge growth in demand.

We took a look at Google search volumes for various different AI powered platforms.

You can read more about our approach to this in the methodology at the end of this article.

We found:

Searches in Google UK  over time for the brand terms of major AI platforms
Month	ChatGPT	Character AI	Open AI	Midjourney	Dall-E	Google Bard
February 2022	0	90	7800	10	1000	0
March 2022	0	90	6300	760	720	0
April 2022	0	90	11700	890	22200	0
May 2022	0	90	12500	5280	14800	10
June 2022	0	120	26200	47900	450000	0
July 2022	0	70	15300	78600	110000	10
August 2022	0	150	18700	184500	135000	0
September 2022	0	380	20200	112700	90500	0
October 2022	0	4490	28000	61600	90500	10
November 2022	700	10020	28000	61600	60500	0
December 2022	2653000	41000	356000	123600	90500	10
January 2023	6330000	188500	533000	214500	110000	30
February 2023	7240000	289000	411000	175500	90500	90500
March 2023	9470000	296400	478000	295500	110000	135000
April 2023	8350000	980200	411000	295500	2935	90500

At the time of gathering this data, the most recent complete month available was April 2023. And what was demonstrable is the search in searches for major AI powered platforms in the last year.

In the UK alone, there were over 8.3 million searches for “Chat GPT” (and close variants) in Google UK.

Just 6 months prior, this number was under 1,000.

It’s a similar story across a host of other platforms as well.

Image generators such as Midjourney have enjoyed high growth in search demand as well, with almost 300,000 searches per month for that particular one.

 

AI Information Searchers

We used a similar methodology to look for demand for AI more generally (not specific to certain tools or platforms).

We found an astronomical surge in demand for people looking for things like “AI tools,” or similar.

We looked up the monthly searches in Google UK for the following queries:

• ai
• artificial intelligence
• generative ai
• new ai
• drawing ai
• ai image generator
• ai artwork generator
• ai generated images
• ai picture generator
• free ai art generator
• ai photo generator
• free ai image generator
• chat ai
• ai chatbot
• chatbots
• chatbot ai
• ai video maker
• ai essay writer

We then looked at the sum totals for each of 2021, 2022 and 2023 as far as the end of May (to which point the data was available). We found:

Searches in Google UK  over time for the brand terms of major AI platforms
Keyword	2021  (Google UK Searches)	2022  (Google UK Searches)	2023 to end of May  (Google UK Searches)
ai	395400	476800	782500
artificial intelligence	278600	252400	342000
generative ai	1020	6980	62600
new ai	8540	12020	43400
drawing ai	10050	66800	45900
ai image generator	16560	417500	456500
ai artwork generator	34630	442300	455500
ai generated images	12210	145000	116700
ai picture generator	4840	75590	65220
free ai art generator	1930	30630	52100
ai photo generator	1990	39430	46720
free ai image generator	790	9540	37300
chat ai	4150	52360	329500
ai chatbot	9630	40920	190700
chatbots	90900	107200	153500
chatbot ai	5490	23180	63700
ai video maker	380	1270	4370
ai essay writer	1390	12120	37320
Total of all above queries	878500	2212040	3285530

For most of the above queries, there have been as many searches in the opening 5 months of 2023, as there were in the entire of 2022.

And this certainly applies when we total all of the queries we looked at.

In 2021, these queries saw a total of 878,500 searches across the year, jumping by 151% to over 2.2 million in 2022.

And then in the first 5 months of 2023 we’ve already seen more than a 48% increase in searches versus the whole of 2022, with over 3.2 million in total across these keywords so far.

Google searches can tell us all sorts of things. Such as how many people are looking to resign from their jobs! Check out our employee retention statistics here!

AI Market Size

Here are some fairly mind blowing facts in terms of market size for AI globally:

• The global AI market was valued at over $69 billion in 2022 (source)
• It’s expected, according to that same report, to reach an incredible $1,871.2 billion by 2032
• When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it took just 5 days to reach 1 million users
• The latest data suggests it has in excess of 100 million users, just 7 months after launch
• As of January 2022, over 430,000 companies in the UK had adopted the use of some sort of AI technology. There’s no more recent figure, but we can be confident that as of July 2023, this figure is considerably higher.

What Does AI Look Like In 2024?

It feels like AI might never stop being the hot topic on everyones mind!

More people than ever are using digital assistants, and companies are constantly working on implementing AI in all sorts of tasks.

Microsoft is creating CoPilot for example, which will even be able do things like produce Excel formulas!

As a business that has been delivering our biggest Excel course for over 10 years, we are very excited to see how it works and implement it in our courses!

There’s seemingly a significant breakthrough in AI technology every week at the moment.

And we’re all still learning how to truly adopt this technology in the more effective way to enhance our productivity and the quality of our work.

So we think we can confidently say that AI growth will be astronomical as we continue into the future.

This statistics piece also goes hand in hand with our Excel AI Statistics article!

Methodology

Survey Data

We worked with market research specialists, Censuswide, to survey 2,009 people in June 2023. We then disregarded any respondents who said they did not have a job and adjusted the figures accordingly.

Keyword Data

We used kwfinder.com keyword data for this piece.

For the branded keywords, we only included any branded terms that had an average of over 1,000,000 global searches in the 3 months up to June 2023. All other search terms were excluded.

Where there were close variants for a search term, both were used and their quantities added together. These search terms were:

chatgpt, chat gpt, character ai, openai, midjourney, open ai, dall e, beta character ai, google bard, midjourney ai, ai character

For our generic keywords, we queried the following keywords in kwfinder:

ai, ai article writer, ai image generator, ai chatbot, ai video maker, ai article writer

We then looked at these keywords and any suggested keywords from kwfinder and used any that had over 10,000 average monthly searches in the last 3 months to form our bank of keywords.

Looking for more useful statistics? Check out our stats on virtual learning and how its working in 2023!