We surveyed our readers to find out how they're using AI tools, which ones they've tried, and how they feel about where all of this is heading. 1,385 of you responded, and the results were more nuanced and complicated than we expected.

The biggest pattern we saw across job levels, industries, and demographics: how someone feels about AI is strongly correlated with how often they use it.

But it's not a simple story of "try it and you'll love it." The people who use AI the most are both the most optimistic about its potential and the most clear-eyed about its risks.

It’s important to note at the outset that this isn’t a scientific survey, so it may not reflect the population at large, but it’s nevertheless an interesting snapshot of Peak readers. Here's what we found.

When you cross-reference how people feel about AI's overall impact with how worried they are about their own jobs, four groups emerge: unconcerned optimists (36% of working respondents) who aren’t concerned about AI’s impact on their job and are optimistic about the tech generally, concerned pessimists (23%), unconcerned pessimists (22%), and concerned optimists (18%). We also found that final group, who are positive about AI's trajectory broadly but also worried about what it means for their own careers, are the heaviest AI users, which raised an obvious question: what do the people most familiar with the tech think about it?

Though they’re the smallest group, the concerned optimists might be the most knowledgable about where we’re at with AI right now. They use the tools constantly, find them genuinely valuable, and are simultaneously clear-eyed about the fact that those same tools might reshape or eliminate their roles.

Among senior leaders — C-suite, SVPs, and Directors/VPs — 69% are optimistic about AI's impact generally. For junior and entry-level staff, it drops to 45%.

When it comes to AI’s impact on their own job, only 4% of senior leaders are "very concerned" and 21% are “somewhat concerned.” Compare that to junior staff, 13% of whom are “very concerned” and 42% of whom are “somewhat concerned.”

The uncomfortable reality this survey points to is that the people making organizational decisions about AI adoption are the most optimistic and the least personally concerned, while the people navigating the consequences — mid-level and junior staff — are more pessimistic.

About a quarter of our working respondents either own a business or plan to start one in the next 12 months. Their relationship with AI looks meaningfully different from the employees in our audience.

The usage rates are similar: 44% of business owners use AI daily versus 40% of employees. But sentiment diverges sharply. 63% of business owners are optimistic about AI (including 15% "very optimistic"), compared to 50% of employees (with only 6% "very optimistic"). Business owners are 2.5 times more likely to feel strongly positive about AI.

Another interesting difference between employees and business owners shows up in tool preference. Employees lean much harder into Microsoft Copilot as their primary tool (29% vs. 20% for owners), almost certainly because it's being pushed through enterprise environments. Business owners are more likely to have chosen ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity as their go-to.

Retirees showed interesting AI usage patterns. 25% have never tried AI tools at all, and another 21% have tried but rarely use them — that's 46% who are essentially non-users. But on the other end, 21% use AI daily and 18% use it several times a week. There's very little middle ground. They're either in or they're out.

This split maps almost perfectly onto sentiment. 70% of daily-using retirees are optimistic about AI. Among retirees who have never tried it, just 21% are optimistic and 43% are very pessimistic, the most extreme negativity of any subgroup in the entire survey.

The emotional language is equally stark. Among daily-using retirees, 22% reach for words like "helpful" or "useful" to describe AI, and only 3% say something in the family of "scary" or "concerning." Among retirees who've never tried AI, those numbers flip: 23% say "scary" or "concerning," and just 3% say "helpful."

When retirees do use AI, their use cases are distinctly life-oriented. The top applications are research and general information-gathering (30% of retiree users), writing and editing (19%), health and medical questions (16%), and travel planning (15%).

Some other interesting use cases this group described: recipe conversions, financial and investing questions, letter writing, vacation planning, product comparisons, and interior design brainstorming. This is a completely different value proposition than the "10x your productivity" framing that dominates AI coverage.

Across all respondents, 74% have tried ChatGPT, making it by far the most widely sampled tool. Google Gemini follows at 57%, then Microsoft Copilot at 44%. After a steep drop: Perplexity (16%), Anthropic's Claude (15%), xAI's Grok (8%), and DeepSeek (5%).

ChatGPT is also the primary tool for 52% of respondents. Google Gemini is the primary for 30%, Microsoft Copilot for 21%. Then a steep drop to Claude and Perplexity at about 5% each.

The gap between "tried" and "primary" is especially interesting for Google and Microsoft. Both get widely sampled — 57% and 44% respectively — but many of those users default back to ChatGPT.

Daily users explore much more broadly: they've tried an average of 3.1 tools compared to 2.1 for non-daily users. Nearly 95% of daily users have tried ChatGPT, and they're far more likely to have ventured into Claude (31% vs. 12%), Perplexity (30% vs. 10%), and DeepSeek (10% vs. 4%).

We asked respondents to describe, in open-ended questions, how they feel about AI and what they’re using it for. Here are some revealing, insightful, and funny submissions we selected across a range of industries and job functions.

How people feel about it:

Creative ways people are using AI: