Workers are not waiting for AI to happen to them. About one in ten is paying for it out of their own pocket

There is a version of the AI story in which workers are the thing being happened to. Their jobs are exposed, their tasks are automated, and their futures are forecast by people who will not be in the room when it happens.

Deloitte asked 25,000 of them what they are doing, and the answer is not that.

Two in three have used AI for work. One in four uses it every day. And about one worker in ten is paying for at least one tool out of their own pocket. The survey suggests the tools are reaching workers faster than employers are providing them. Deloitte, which sells AI consulting, estimates the combined bill at £958 million a year.

That is not a workforce being dragged. That is a workforce ahead of its managers, spending its own money to do the job better. It is one of the more encouraging things I have read about AI and British work this year, and I did not expect to find it in a survey about unofficial software.

Then two things take the shine off it.

The first is where the time goes. Users say the tools save them about seventy minutes a week. Deloitte says most of that time goes into doing more work for the same employer. So the worker pays for the tool and the employer receives the hour. Others noticed that last week, and they were right to.

The second is the part I have not seen anyone write, and it is what this paper can add.

When a business buys an AI subscription, it is a business cost, set against the tax bill. When a sole trader buys one, the same. When an employee buys the same subscription to do the same work, HMRC's test for relief asks whether every person in that job would have to pay for it. A tool you chose because it makes you better at your work will usually fail that test. So it comes out of pay that has already been taxed.

None of this is a scandal. The rule is old, and it exists to stop people deducting the ordinary cost of being employed. But it means the employees who are most eager to use AI are the only people in the chain who get no help paying for it.

Leah has what Deloitte measured and what it only estimated, including why one in six is not one in six workers. Ines has the rule, and the one situation in which it may bend. The Playbook has what to do if you are one of the people paying. The short version: the cheapest AI subscription you will ever have is the one your employer buys.

We have asked Deloitte how it reached £958 million and how many of the people paying are self-employed, since they can deduct it. We will print the answer.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.