Adobe today published survey findings showing that 90% of workers want to use creative AI tools at work while only 9% actually do, a gap the company frames as a growing problem for teams under pressure to produce more content with fewer resources.

The research, conducted through Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Firefly, surveyed 1,002 full-time employees in the United States who use AI at work at least once a week. It was shared with PPC Land on July 21, 2026. The central finding is a mismatch: interest in creative AI runs high across nearly every category of worker, but day-to-day use remains concentrated in routine, text-based tasks rather than the image, video, and ideation work the survey defines as creative.

According to Adobe, workers estimate they spend an average of 7.5 hours a week, or nearly 400 hours a year, on tasks that could be enhanced by greater use of creative AI tools. That figure sits at the center of the study's argument. If the estimate holds, the time in question is not marginal. It represents close to two full working months per employee spent on work that the respondents themselves believe could be handled differently.

What the survey measured

The study draws a distinction that shapes every number in it. Creative AI uses, in Adobe's framing, covers tools applied to visual or imaginative tasks: AI image or video generation, designing graphics, brainstorming ideas, creative writing, and visualizing concepts. Technical AI uses covers analytical or task-based work: summarizing documents, drafting and editing content, researching topics, analyzing data, and automating workflows.

Measured against that split, current behavior leans heavily technical. Workers are most likely to reach for AI to summarize information, cited by 77% of respondents, to research topics at 76%, to brainstorm ideas at 69%, and to draft documents at 66%. Only 9% say they mostly use AI for creative work tasks. The result is a workforce that has adopted AI broadly but narrowly, treating it as a productivity aid for written material rather than a tool for generating visual or conceptual output.

Interest points in a different direction. According to Adobe, 72% of workers believe AI has the potential to make them more creative at work, and among those who already use creative AI, 73% say it improves their ability to communicate complex ideas. One in three workers say they would like to use AI for image and video generation but currently do not, a statement of intent that the study returns to repeatedly as evidence of untapped demand.

The methodology carries a 95% confidence level and what Adobe describes as a low three percent margin of error. The company notes that the research relied on self-reported data, meaning respondents may hold biases and that discrepancies may exist between their answers and their actual experiences. That caveat matters for the headline time estimate in particular, since the 400-hour figure reflects what workers believe rather than a measured audit of their calendars.

A third of the workday, by workers' own estimate

Beyond the weekly hours, respondents were asked to estimate how much of their regular responsibilities could be enhanced through greater use of creative AI. The answer came back at 32%, close to a third of their total workload. Among workers whose jobs already involve many creative tasks, that estimate climbs to 45%.

Generational patterns run through the data. According to Adobe, 71% of Gen Z and millennial workers say AI tools have the potential to make them more creative at work, and 44% of that same group report being very or extremely interested in creative AI tools. Interest also concentrates by role. The share of workers who are very or extremely interested in creative AI rises from 45% overall to 63% among those in primarily creative positions.

Belief in the technology's potential holds up across sectors, though the exact figures vary. Technology and Innovation leads, with 86% of its workers saying AI could make them more creative, followed closely by Retail, Food and Hospitality at 85% and Healthcare and Life Sciences at 85%. Business and Professional Services registers 83%, Education 83%, and Finance, Legal and Real Estate 79%.

Reported benefit, as opposed to belief, tells a slightly different story. Employees in Business and Professional Services are the most likely to say creative AI has already improved their work, at 80%. Retail, Food and Hospitality follows at 74%, Technology and Innovation at 73%, Healthcare and Life Sciences at 71%, Finance, Legal and Real Estate at 68%, and Education at 67%. The ordering shifts between the two questions, suggesting that the sectors most confident about AI's promise are not always the ones seeing the clearest returns from it yet.

The training gap

If interest is high and the perceived opportunity is large, the survey points to preparation as the missing piece. More than half of workers, 53%, say their employer supports learning and adopting creative AI tools at work. Yet only one in three reports receiving formal training on creative AI use. The distinction between encouragement and instruction runs through the findings: employers appear willing to endorse the tools without consistently teaching people how to operate them.

Asked what would most increase their adoption of creative AI, workers named a set of practical needs rather than better technology. Examples of how AI applies to their specific role topped the list at 37%. Better integration with existing tools and workflows followed at 36%, recommendations from colleagues or industry experts at 34%, employer-provided training or onboarding at 33%, and data privacy and security assurances at 32%.

Organizational structure emerges as a differentiator. According to Adobe, workers whose organizations have dedicated individuals or teams focused on AI integration are significantly more likely to feel supported in learning and experimenting with new tools. The presence of a person or group whose job is to make AI work, in other words, correlates with employees feeling equipped to use it.

What holds workers back

The study frames the largest obstacle not as reluctance but as uncertainty about fit. Nearly half of workers, 47%, say they are unsure how creative AI applies to their role. That relevance question outranks every other barrier by a wide margin.

The remaining blockers cluster below it. Lack of training or resources and unclear company policies or guidelines tie at 29% each. Difficulty integrating AI into existing workflows registers at 27%, cost of tools at 26%, lack of access to tools at 24%, and lack of knowledge on how to use creative AI tools also at 24%. Time constraints account for 20%, and resistance from colleagues or management, the smallest factor, sits at 13%.

Read together, the barrier data points away from the tools themselves. The three leading obstacles, relevance, training, and policy, are organizational and educational rather than technical. Workers are not, by this account, rejecting creative AI after trying it. Many have not established how it connects to the work they already do.

Adoption also varies sharply by industry. Workers in Technology and Innovation are the most likely to describe their organization as ahead of the curve, with 37% saying their company leads compared to competitors and 28% saying it lags. The balance inverts elsewhere. In Business and Professional Services, only 22% feel ahead while 45% feel behind. Healthcare and Life Sciences splits 20% ahead against 35% behind, and Retail, Food and Hospitality 16% against 37%.

Education stands out as the sector least likely to feel ahead. Only 13% of its workers say their organization is leading on creative AI adoption, and 40% say they feel behind. The survey attributes the lag to limited budgets, stricter policies, and fewer training resources compared with other industries, though it presents that reading as context rather than a measured cause.

Why this matters for marketing teams

For advertising and marketing professionals, the survey lands on a familiar tension. The pressure to generate more creative output has been building across the industry, and the gap between what AI could do and what teams actually use it for has become a recurring theme in the data.

Adobe's own research has repeatedly documented that gap in marketing specifically. A January 2026 study found that marketers automate only 18% of their daily tasks while estimating that another 29% could be automated, placing nearly half of all marketing work within reach of automation that remains manually handled. That study also found that the average marketer loses roughly 91 days a year to tasks that could be streamlined. The creative AI survey extends the pattern from marketers to the broader workforce, and the 400-hour annual estimate maps closely onto the earlier productivity findings.

The concentration of AI use in complex, creative work is itself well documented. A separate analysis showing that only 5% of occupational tasks account for 59% of all AI interactions found that the heaviest usage clusters in tasks scoring high on creativity and cognitive complexity, with idea generation showing the strongest correlation to AI adoption. That finding complicates the new survey's central number. If workers already gravitate toward AI for creative and cognitively demanding tasks when they use it at all, the 9% figure suggests that the tools most people reach for still handle text rather than images or video.

Skill, not just access, has surfaced as a constraint in the same body of research. Adobe's finding that 91% of marketers abandon generative AI tasks because of unusable output, with prompt quality scoring an average of 57 out of 100, points to the practical difficulty of getting creative tools to produce usable results. The training gap in the new survey and the prompting gap in the earlier one describe two sides of the same problem: workers want the output but lack the instruction to reliably generate it.

The competitive framing is worth noting for what it is. Adobe publishes this data as supporting material for its Firefly and Acrobat product lines, and the company has a commercial interest in demonstrating unmet demand for creative AI tools. The disclosed confidence level and margin of error indicate methodological seriousness, but the absence of independent validation means the figures are best read as directional indicators of workplace sentiment rather than settled fact. The survey documents a gap between interest and use. It does not establish that closing that gap through any particular set of tools produces the outcomes the framing implies.

Adobe positions its own products as the bridge across the gap it describes, citing Firefly and Acrobat as tools that let workers create, refine, and present ideas across both creative and technical workflows. That positioning is the study's commercial purpose, and it sits alongside a broader pattern of Adobe research releases through 2026 that have consistently measured the distance between AI's perceived potential in marketing and its actual deployment.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Adobe, through its Acrobat and Firefly products, surveyed 1,002 full-time United States workers who use AI at work at least once a week.

What: The study found that 90% of workers are interested in using creative AI tools while only 9% mostly use AI for creative work, that workers estimate 7.5 hours a week, or nearly 400 hours a year, is spent on tasks creative AI could enhance, and that just one in three has received formal training on such tools.

When: The findings were shared with PPC Land on July 21, 2026.

Where: The survey covered full-time workers across the United States, spanning industries including Technology and Innovation, Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Business and Professional Services, and Education.

Why: Adobe frames the gap between interest and use as a competitive issue for teams under pressure to produce more content, and publishes the data as supporting material for its Firefly and Acrobat product lines, which the company positions as tools to close that gap.