AI at Work: Use, Complementary Technologies, and Task Reallocation
Vahagn Jerbashian, Montserrat Vilalta-Bufí · CESifo · 27 Oct 2026
Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?
- Will AI widen inequality?
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
We provide evidence from a 2025 survey of individuals in Spain on workplace use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other modern digital technologies. AI use is already economically meaningful but far from pervasive, with about 16% of workers reporting AI use. Its adoption is highly uneven across workers and jobs, with strong gradients by education, age, earnings, and firm size and scope, as well as substantial within-occupation heterogeneity. AI use is strongly correlated with the use of other modern technologies, which accounts for a larger share of variation than any worker or job characteristic considered separately, including occupational exposure measures. The purposes of AI use also vary markedly across demographic groups and jobs. Users report predominantly positive productivity effects in abstract cognitive tasks, together with limited but systematic time reallocation across tasks.
About this publication
Academic journal. Published in an academic journal — typically peer-reviewed before publication, though indexing alone doesn't guarantee review depth.
- Published
- 2026 (recently)
- Citations
- 0 (OpenAlex)
0 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2026 papers in this collection for a fair comparison.
Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion.
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