If you’ve ever felt like your firm is behind on AI, I want to walk you through some data that says the opposite is probably true.
Google put out a report called the AI & Economy ATLAS. The underlying data came out back in April, and they did a fresh write-up on it on September 15th. It’s built on 15 million de-identified Gemini interactions, mapped against the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own occupation and task codes: over 800 occupations and more than 4,000 distinct tasks. One of the big takeaways: finance users were the most disproportionate users of AI in the entire population they measured.
Financial and Investment Analysts Are the Heaviest Users
Financial and investment analysts are the single most active AI occupation Google measured, out of more than 800 occupations tracked. If you’re trying to figure out where you stand, the comparison that matters isn’t against other finance workers. It’s against every other industry, and on a per capita basis, your finance team is probably using AI more than any of them. If you’ve ever felt behind on AI, this data says that’s probably not true.
Finance Isn’t Going Away
We’ve lived in this pressure cooker since essentially day one of ChatGPT, with people insisting accounting is the first thing AI is going to take out. That hasn’t been true. There’s been plenty of automation and plenty of new tools, but look at the revenue numbers from the Big 4 and the mid-market firms. No one’s declining significantly. AI is not impacting the work that needs to get done in accounting and finance at the scale people have been predicting for four years.
Automation vs. Augmentation
Less than 10% of the usage Google saw is AI doing a task fully, end to end. Most of what people are doing is drafting, reviewing, brainstorming, or treating it like a search engine. That’s what’s driving the overall usage number up: people using AI consistently as part of their workflow, not as a replacement for it. It drafts the first version of a proposal deck. It drafts a memo. It takes a first pass at a tax paper, pulls in a filing, checks an XML file against a tax workbook. It does the first sweep, and then you tick and tie.
The more judgment a task needs, the less people ask AI to just do it. For routine tasks, like data entry, formatting, or cleaning up a paragraph, people are happy to let AI take the whole thing over. But when it’s real analysis, when real judgment is involved, they don’t hand it off. They use AI as a partner in the work, not the one doing it alone.
The Five-Category Framework
Google sorted usage into five buckets, and it’s a useful way to look at your own habits:
- Partial Drafting: AI generates a draft or template that you then edit and finish.
- Review and Refinement: AI checks or edits something you already wrote, including turning a talk-to-text recording into an organized write-up.
- Ideation and Strategy: AI as a thought partner when you know the business problem but need help mapping the approach.
- Info Retrieval: the quick, ad hoc lookup: what’s the tax treatment of X, pull up a code section, point me to a source.
When I was at PwC, my whole job was taking business knowledge and translating it into technical workflows, automating a process, or changing the way people interacted with it. That’s exactly where AI is strongest today: if you’re a business user who knows something is inefficient but doesn’t have the technical expertise to fix it, AI is a useful partner to talk it through with.
Who’s Using AI the Most
Ranked by usage relative to how many people actually hold the job, financial and investment analysts are the most over-represented occupation in Google’s entire dataset. Market research analysts rank second, and software developers third. The top two are finance roles, ahead of software developers and systems administrators. Accountants, auditors, and credit analysts also rank among the heaviest AI-using occupations globally.
What This Means for You
You’re not behind. The real competitive question is whether you’ve been able to move AI from sitting next to you and helping along the way, to full automation, and whether that shift makes sense for the specific task. If you want a concrete next step: pull your last 10 AI interactions and sort them into those buckets. See what your most-used mode actually is, and whether it matches what you’d expect.
Key Takeaways
- Financial and investment analysts, and finance professionals broadly, are the biggest AI users per capita in the economy Google measured.
- Accountants, auditors, and credit analysts also rank among the heaviest AI-using occupations globally.
- Under 10% of usage in finance-analytical work is full automation. Most of it is drafting, review, ideation, and lookup.
- If you’re not using AI much day to day, that’s unusual for someone in this field. Worth a second look.
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