Executive Generative AI Use at 53.2%, Employees at 37.9%

How wide is the AI usage gap between executives and employees?

A survey of 7,675 US adults found that generative AI usage among executives and business owners stood at 53.2%, higher than the 37.9% reported among general employees. The figures appeared in a report by PR firm Channel V Media published on October 7, 2026, based on a survey conducted in June by Proper Insights and Analytics. Respondents included 1,960 executives and business owners and 1,471 employees. Channel V Media is a firm that helps companies refine how they are portrayed by AI engines.

• Generative AI use: executives/business owners 53.2%, employees 37.9%
• Agentic AI use: executives 17.5%, employees 6.6% — executives use it 2.7 times more
• Most common use case: executives and business owners favor research, while employees favor internet search

Channel V Media noted that leaders have moved beyond using AI merely as a search tool toward AI-assisted creative and knowledge work, while a significant portion of the workforce has not followed suit.

However, when it came to handing high-risk customer interactions over to AI, executives were not much different from other respondents. 76.8% of executives preferred human representatives for banking and financial services, and 77.4% preferred humans for healthcare matters, with employee figures essentially the same. Channel V Media advised executives to keep this preference in mind when marketing products to the general public.

How many leaders pretend to understand AI?

A survey by technology and management consulting firm Emergn (350 respondents) found that 18% of senior US leaders admitted to having pretended to understand AI better than they actually do.

• 27%: said their career prospects would suffer if they fail to significantly improve their AI capabilities within the next year
• 19%: said they feel anxious or lose sleep over the pace of AI-driven change
• 27%: said they would be willing to switch companies for better AI training
• 20%: said they feel out of their depth due to AI's impact on their role

Emergn CEO Alex Adamopoulos said that while it's difficult to admit not knowing something in a position where you're expected to have the answers, pretending to know only leaves the same question unanswered the next day.

Implications for Korean Enterprise AX

Both surveys were conducted among US respondents, so the figures cannot be directly applied to domestic organizations. However, the underlying framework of questions can still be useful. Judging a company's overall AI adoption level based solely on executive usage risks overlooking what use cases frontline staff are actually stuck with. If employees are mainly using AI for search, training should prioritize expanding use cases toward research and document drafting rather than simply deploying more tools.

It's worth considering not excluding leadership from training targets. In organizations where leaders may be pretending to understand AI, as the Emergn survey suggests, it may be better to establish a separate training path where executives can ask basic questions regardless of rank.

For financial and healthcare companies looking to integrate AI into customer touchpoints, it is safer to treat the finding that executives themselves prefer human interaction as a design premise, and to first establish clear handoff paths from AI to human representatives.

There is one thing worth checking in your own organization this week: ask by department whether executives and staff are using AI for search, or for research and writing.

Source: Executives use AI more than their workers do