DeskTime study confirms AI usage is tripling year-on-year among office employees
A recent 3-year global study of tens of thousands of workers by DeskTime found that AI adoption has gone vertical, with total time tracked nearly tripling annually as employees increasingly integrate these tools into their workdays. ChatGPT remains the most popular choice, but its share is falling significantly to competitors Gemini and Claude.
The trends are clear:
On AI usage:
- Work time spent in AI tools grew 2.6x between 2023 and 2024, then 2.8x between 2024 and 2025.
- Data from the first four months of 2026 suggests we are now on track to hit a 3x growth rate for the year.
- The number of power users grew 3x between 2023 and 2024, and it grew 2.7x in 2025.
- By the end of April 2026, the power user count has already exceeded the previous year’s total, representing a 1.7x increase in just four months.
On the most popular AI tools:
- ChatGPT: Fell from a dominant 99.91% share of total AI tracked time in 2023 to just 74.71% in the first part of 2026.
- Gemini: Has surged to become the primary challenger, capturing 14.38% of tracked time.
- Claude: Seen a significant rise, particularly in 2026, now accounting for 8.56% of office AI usage and likely to take another massive bite out of ChatGPT by the end of the year.
- Copilot: Appears to be stuck in a rut with its regular users continuing to use it, but not gaining or losing any momentum either way.
- Other tools have their moments, but none have managed to establish a strong foothold in the office space.
So, not only is AI use growing around the world, its growth is accelerating. The message is clear: AI is becoming increasingly ingrained into the day-to-day processes of office workers.
In terms of tools, while 2023 was a year of near-total monopoly for ChatGPT, 2026 shows a workforce that is diversifying its toolkit, mostly by experimenting with the other most popular alternatives. Claude’s rocket start to 2026 will be interesting to follow through the year and is likely to take another chunk out of ChatGPT’s dominance by the end of it.
“With AI, it’s often difficult to separate hype from reality, so DeskTime decided to look into what’s really going on in today’s workplace. The figures are compelling. While a yearly tripling of AI usage may seem extreme, one look at my own team and our data reveals – it’s par for the course. AI is fundamentally redefining work and the risk of falling behind is growing exponentially,” – Artis Rozentals, DeskTime CEO
About the study
The study looked at the anonymized data of 50,000+ DeskTime users from 2023 through April 2026, focusing on total time spent using AI tools and disaggregating the data by the most popular ones. The study also examined AI power user trends – users with at least 26 hours logged in a year.
The data
Note: “Others” consists of Perplexity AI, Mistral, Llama, Krutrim, Alibaba Qwen.
| Share of AI time tracked | |||||||
| Year | ChatGPT | Gemini | Claude | Copilot | Grok | DeepSeek | Others |
| 2023 | 99.91% | – | 0.08% | 0.01% | – | – | – |
| 2024 | 92.25% | 4.80% | 1.42% | 1.37% | – | – | 0.15% |
| 2025 | 83.73% | 8.49% | 3.23% | 1.00% | 0.98% | 2.31% | 0.26% |
| 2026 (first 4 mo) | 74.71% | 14.38% | 8.56% | 0.88% | 0.55% | 0.75% | 0.17% |
| Share of power users (26+ hours tracked per year) | |||||||
| Year | ChatGPT | Gemini | Claude | Copilot | Grok | DeepSeek | Others |
| 2023 | 100.00% | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| 2024 | 95.58% | 2.49% | 1.13% | 0.68% | – | – | 0.11% |
| 2025 | 87.15% | 6.63% | 2.89% | 0.69% | 0.61% | 1.75% | 0.28% |
| 2026 (first 4 mo) | 75.61% | 14.43% | 8.01% | 0.84% | 0.51% | 0.55% | 0.05% |
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