Gallup: AI Pays Off Most When Your Manager Is On Board

Posted on in Productivity

Your daily brief on leadership and business

Gallup has updated its research on AI and workplace productivity, and the findings offer a useful reality check. In May 2026, 65% of employees at organisations that had implemented AI said it had a positive effect on their productivity and efficiency. But Gallup notes that the benefits are concentrated at the level of individual tasks rather than whole workplace systems, and that the impact across organisations remains uneven.

The more you use it, the more it helps

Breadth of use matters a lot. Among U.S. employees who use AI at work, the share reporting a positive productivity effect climbs steadily with the number of purposes they use it for:

  • 45% for one or two work purposes;
  • 66% for three or four;
  • 78% for five or six;
  • 90% for seven or more.

By task, coding assistance scored highest at 77%, followed by presentation creation at 76%, data analytics at 75%, writing and editing at 68% and search or research at 65%. In other words, the people who treat AI as a one-trick spellchecker are the least impressed by it, which is not entirely surprising.

The manager effect

Use is also rising fastest at the top. As of the second quarter of 2026, 51% of leaders use AI frequently, up from 17% in 2023, compared with 36% of managers and 26% of individual contributors. Leaders are also more enthusiastic: 21% call AI’s impact extremely positive, versus 13% of individual contributors.

Gallup identifies manager support and integration of AI into workflows as the two conditions most strongly linked to frequent use. Yet only 36% of employees in AI-integrating organisations strongly agree that their manager actively supports their team’s AI use. Those who do are 9.3 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done. Gallup’s advice is practical: managers should support AI use at team level, model it themselves, answer questions and show how it connects to daily work. The tool may be artificial, but the encouragement still has to come from a real person.