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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.
The Quick Facts and Figures
If you only want the summary, here’s the key information (and you’ll get more detail and sources within):
- 37% of people in the UK have now used AI at work
- 31% of us are worried about AI taking our jobs
- 56% of those aged 16 – 24 with jobs have used AI in their work
- There were over 9 million searches in Google in the UK in March 2023 for “ChatGPT” and close variants
- In 2023, we’ve seen a 48% increase in searches for various AI platforms in the UK
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.
excel-promo-1We 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!