AI Papers Atlas Wave 1
AIORG-W004 Government & IGO research AI × management and organizations

The Microstructure of AI Diffusion: Evidence from Firms, Business Functions, and Worker Tasks

Also recorded as: CES-WP-26-25 · NBER Working Paper 35141

government working paper full text

Source of record — www2.census.gov See it on the corpus view
Recorded claims
2
coded from the inspected source
Evidence classes
1
survey-or-synthesis
Recorded limitations
4
stated, never hidden

From the hash-bound evidence releases

Recorded claims

Each claim states what the inspected source says, at the recorded location—bounded by its scope and graded by its confidence. Nothing here is a synthesis across works.

In the November 2025-January 2026 Business Trends and Outlook Survey, 17.9% of firms reported current AI use, rising to 31.2% when weighted by employment; 57% of adopting firms used AI in no more than three business functions.

confidence: high for reported survey estimates; medium for construct comparability survey-or-synthesis apw-r0-seed

Scope: US employer firms in the specified BTOS waves; current use under the survey definition.

Among all AI-using firms, about 44% reported task augmentation. Conditional on the subset reporting at least one surveyed task effect, 66% reported augmentation alone. About 2% of all AI-using firms reported employment decreases. Greater functional and integration breadth and firm-performance measures were associated, while some operational investment and deployment measures were associated with employment declines; these cross-sectional relationships are associative, not causal.

confidence: medium-high survey-or-synthesis apw-r0-seed

Scope: Near-term US firm reports; no causal attribution and no long-run displacement inference.

Structured relationships

In-corpus citations

Only source-supplied cites relationships whose two endpoints are admitted are shown. Invocation evidence remains a separate relationship.

Cites (0)

No in-corpus outgoing citation is available in the current enrichment coverage.

Cited by (0)

No in-corpus incoming citation is available in the current enrichment coverage.

Boundaries

Limitations & independence

Recorded at coding time, carried with the work forever. A claim without its limits is not evidence.

Recorded limitations

  • Survey responses and AI definitions are self-reported
  • Reference periods and firm/function measures differ
  • Performance relationships are cross-sectional associations
  • Working paper

Source independence

Research paper using the US Census Bureau Business Trends and Outlook Survey; self-reported employer responses but not vendor product telemetry.