New Research Report Finds Just 5% of Employees Using GenAI Apps Are Realizing Meaningful Productivity Gains
NROC Security USA, an innovative AI security company focused on effectiveness of employee use of Generative AI apps, has published its latest quarterly research. It reveals that few employees in businesses are using GenAI effectively enough to create meaningful productivity gains, and looks at what leaders can do about it.
"We are encouraging our employees to use GenAI apps, but are our businesses becoming more productive?" asked Antti Reijonen, NROC's CEO. "It's one of the most common questions we hear from leadership teams, and one of the hardest to answer. Our second quarterly study looks into it."
NROC sampled 4,800 business users and 139,000 GenAI interactions across a typical enterprise mix of knowledge-worker profiles during Q2 2026, and the results are published in its latest research report, available now.
Usage Is Way Ahead of Effectiveness
Active GenAI usage nearly doubled from the company's Q1 study, from 19% to 31% of eligible employees, and the number of app families in use nearly tripled, from 19 to 53. By any adoption measure, GenAI has crossed from a curious minority into the mainstream of daily work. But effectiveness tells a different story. Segmenting employees by how often they use GenAI and how skillfully they prompt, only about 5% qualify as truly effective users – daily or weekly users prompting at a high skill level – even after that group grew tenfold from our Q1 study.
"Our Q2 report's core finding is that frequency and prompting skill, not access to AI, are what actually drive productivity," said Reijonen. "An organization can roll out enterprise licenses to everyone and still see almost no effectiveness gain if usage stays occasional and prompts stay basic.
"This new report lays out a practical framework for closing that gap – productivity-first governance – built around allowing broad access while maintaining visibility, using guardrails as a safety net rather than a wall, surfacing what top users already do well, and building prompting skill team by team," he said.
The full Q2 research report breaks down all the benchmarks in detail – adoption and weekly usage, the app landscape (how ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot are actually being used), prompting-skill data, data-exposure trends, and the full effectiveness index methodology – along with a productivity-first governance framework for closing the gap.
The Full Q2 Research Report Contains:
- The latest enterprise GenAI adoption and effectiveness benchmarks, including 31% active usage vs. roughly 5% effective usage
- Why frequency and prompting skill – not AI access – are the biggest drivers of productivity
- A practical framework for leaders to measure and improve GenAI effectiveness across their company's workforce, following NROC Security's productivity-first governance best practices
Download the "GenAI Effectiveness 2Q 2026" research report here.
NROC Security will continue to publish quarterly reports as the basis for a GenAI Effectiveness Index.
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