Two official numbers, in the same bulletin, that cannot be put next to each other. The argument is being had as though they can.

Two figures from the same statistical office.

Around 35 per cent of British businesses report using at least one artificial intelligence technology. Over roughly the same period, 55 per cent of employees told a national survey they use AI for work or education.

Twenty points apart, and it would be easy to write that as a story about workers running ahead of their employers. I started to.

Then I read what each number actually counts.

The business figure covers firms with ten or more employees. It excludes six sectors outright: agriculture, oil and gas extraction, energy generation and supply, public administration and defence, publicly provided education and health, and finance and insurance. It asks whether the business uses a technology, which is a question about what the firm has adopted, not about what its staff do.

The employee figure comes from a different survey, with a different population, covering Great Britain rather than the United Kingdom. It asks about AI use for work or education. Some of the people in that 55 per cent are students.

So the two cannot be subtracted. One counts organisations in part of the economy, the other counts individuals across most of it, and they are asking about different behaviour. The twenty point gap is not a measurement of anything. It is an artefact of putting two rulers side by side that were never cut to the same scale.

The Office for National Statistics is careful about this. It notes that employees may use AI tools independently as part of their day to day work, which is a real observation and a modest one. It does not claim the gap means what it looks like it means.

What I keep returning to is that this is the best evidence Britain has. Not a vendor survey, not a consultancy forecast. Two proper national statistical exercises, run by the same office, published on the same day in the same bulletin. And they still cannot tell you how many working people in this country are using these tools, because nobody designed them to be read together.

Meanwhile the argument continues. A minister told the Commons in July that there is little conclusive evidence that AI is reducing employment. Firms are making hiring decisions. Ministers are standing up units to monitor something in real time. Somebody will legislate eventually.

All of it will rest on numbers like these: honestly produced, carefully caveated, and measuring adjacent things that a reader, a reporter or a minister will put next to each other anyway because the temptation is enormous and I nearly did it in the second paragraph of this piece.

The honest position is not that the workers are ahead of the bosses. It is that Britain does not currently know, and is deciding anyway.