Workers who use AI every day are the only group who feel positively about its effect on their job security, according to a CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey of 1,686 U.S. workers and students conducted in July 2026 and released this week.
The survey found 30% of respondents use AI daily, 34% use it a few times a week, and 37% never use it. Daily users reported feeling more secure because of AI; everyone else, whether occasional users or non-users, reported feeling less secure. The survey also found more than half of employers have no official AI policy at work, leaving most of the workforce to form its own view of what the technology means for their job without company guidance.
The pattern suggests job-security anxiety about AI is not primarily about the technology’s capability; it is about exposure and control. Workers who use AI daily have hands-on evidence of what it can and cannot do, and some influence over how it is applied to their own work. Everyone else is left to infer the threat from headlines and secondhand accounts, which is a worse basis for judging personal risk and a harder gap to close with reassurance alone; see Workers Trust AI Less Than They Use It, Survey Finds for a related trust gap and Meta’s AI Vision: More Jobs, Not Fewer for one employer’s public counter-framing.
For HR teams, the actionable read is that a formal AI policy alone will not close this gap if it is not paired with actual hands-on access. Rolling out both together, tool access plus a documented use policy, is likely to do more for workforce confidence than either alone, particularly for the majority of employees who are currently using AI occasionally or not at all.
Source: SurveyMonkey
