American workers who never use artificial intelligence (AI) may be more likely to be laid off than those who use AI more regularly, according to new data.
Gallup research found that 62% of workers who have been laid off were non-users of AI who used it once per year or less often. By contrast, only 50% of currently employed workers were non-users of AI, with 22% described as infrequent AI users who utilize it a few times per month or year. Among laid-off workers, 16% were infrequent AI users.
Currently employed workers were also more likely to report using AI on a daily basis or a few times per week, with 28% of current workers reporting that compared with 22% of laid-off workers in their prior role.
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“This pattern holds even after accounting for age, education, type of industry and the length of time since being laid off, suggesting that workers who are AI non-users appear to have been more vulnerable in the job market,” Gallup said.
One particularly vulnerable group was tech workers who reported using AI on a monthly basis or less frequently, as they were three times more likely (18%) to have been laid off than tech workers who used AI at least monthly (6%).
Gallup added that workers in the tech sector were already facing elevated layoff exposure in comparison to other industries, which contributed to there being a stronger pattern between the level of AI use and layoffs than in other sectors.
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The survey also found that American workers are continuing to report that their employers are downsizing their workforces, and they don’t see artificial intelligence (AI) or automation as driving the cuts.
Gallup found that the share of U.S. employees who reported layoffs at their company was about 21% in the first quarter of 2026, as it held relatively steady after the share of such reports nearly tripled from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2025.
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Workers who experienced layoffs were asked by Gallup to describe the primary reason they were laid off and very few – just 1% of respondents – mentioned reasons related to AI and automation.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that AI or automation didn’t contribute to employers’ decisions to move forward with layoffs, as respondents cited other reasons like organizational restructuring and downsizing (15%), or the elimination of a role (3%).
That could suggest that AI is factoring into business leaders’ consideration of their workforce structure and decisions to hire or downsize even if it wasn’t articulated to the laid off workers as the reason they lost their job.
