Retool State of AI Survey Reveals Tech Operators Are Bullish on AI, but Use at Enterprise Level Is Still Nascent Even on Engineering Teams

Retool, the leading development platform for business software, today released the results of its first State of AI Survey, which polled over 1,500 technology workers including software developers, business and engineering leaders, executives, product managers, designers and more, to learn about how they are using and building with AI.

The survey found bullish yet level-headed perceptions on AI’s power to revolutionize the way we work and build technology products, across a variety of roles and titles. Respondents reported lower than expected use of the generally hyped AI and LLM technologies on the market — for now, companies are mostly consumers of AI applications like GitHub Copilot. The majority of companies building internal AI applications on their own are using ChatGPT.

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Key findings of the survey include:

• Those in operations roles had the highest expectations of change fueled by AI (7.8 out of 10), followed by product (7.5), and data and engineering (around 7.4). Slicing by seniority, C-suite executives expected the biggest changes (7.8).
• 54% of respondents that use AI at work do so at companies that encourage it, while 14.7% of respondents are secretly using AI at work even when their employers have policies against it.
• Even among AI’s biggest skeptics (respondents who deemed it overrated), only 14.4% said their company was overinvesting in AI.
• A majority (77.1%) of survey respondents said that their companies have made some sort of effort to adopt AI. But around half (48.9%) said those efforts were fledgling—just getting started or ad-hoc use cases.
• Across sectors and industries, data policy strictness was a spectrum. On the low end, less than 40% of respondents working in the non-profit (31%) and education (35%) sectors reported a strict data policy at their companies. On the high end, healthcare (59%) was 11 points ahead of its closest runner up, energy (48%). Financial services, often a highly regulated space, was in the middle of the pack at 44%.

“The AI revolution has been breathlessly covered but we’ve seen a lot less about use cases, especially in business,” said David Hsu, CEO and founder of Retool. “We did this survey and report because it won’t be possible to truly harness AI without first appreciating how it’s being used. What our findings make clear is that while AI isn’t replacing most technical jobs, it’s reshaping them—and people are latching onto the technologies that help them accelerate and strengthen their work.”

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