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Close ✕The United States firm-adoption survey changes its question, and the number jumps
2025-11-17 · Recorded · science
The source states this happened, and its date is not in the future. The word the source used for it is historical.
The Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey replaced its AI question — previously about use "in producing goods or services" — with one asking about use "in any of its business functions", and expanded the supplement to cover fifteen business functions. The reported national AI use rate, which had climbed gradually to around 10% under the old wording, stood at 17.3% under the new one. This is the cleanest demonstration available that the headline adoption figures circulating in 2026 are not comparable with those from 2024, and it is a fact about the questionnaire rather than about firms.
- Source
- United States Census Bureau; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis · US Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/btos.html ; "AI Question Wording Updates", https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/ ; Census Bureau story, "Large Firms With at Least 20 Employees Biggest AI Users", May 2026; St. Louis Fed, "Measuring AI Adoption among Firms: How You Ask Matters", June 2026
- Standing
- This record: verified · publisher: verified
- How it arrived
- Editorial — A dated record from the Richseen Atlas editorial corpus, written and cited by a curator. Not captured from anywhere, and not live.
- Where
- At a canonical Atlas object, placed and checked by a curator.
- Subject
- PHENOMENON_FIRM_ADOPTION
No source has reported. · Official source connected · Basemap: Natural Earth (public domain) — marks are drawn only from sourced coordinates