🚧 Gallup Exposes Workflow Gaps

AI Use at Work, GPT-5.2, and Vague to Vivid

December 16, 2025

"Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.”

—Joseph Wood Krutch, Author

The AI Breakdown

AI at Work: Quiet Growth, Loud Gaps

Gallup’s latest workforce survey shows 45% of U.S. employees now use AI at work at least a few times a year—up from 40% just a quarter earlier. Weekly use crept from 19% to 23%, and daily use barely budged from 8% to 10%.

So yes, adoption is growing. But usage is shallow, uneven, and largely disconnected from formal strategy.

Axios / Gallup

Here’s the kicker: nearly a quarter of employees say they don’t even know if their company uses AI. That’s not just a stat. That’s a management red flag.

If nearly a quarter of your team can’t answer a yes/no question about one of the most visible tech shifts in a generation, the problem isn’t tech—it’s communication.

Gallup

What Businesses Should Do With This

  1. Assume It’s Happening
    If 45% are using AI, your team is too. Employees are experimenting with or without permission. Waiting for a formal launch just delays structure and increases risk.

  2. Kill the Confusion
    Publish a one-page policy: approved tools, forbidden data types, and where work output must live (CRM, ticket, doc system). Make it readable in 90 seconds and keep it visible.

  3. Train Managers First
    Gallup notes broader adoption tracks with managerial support and strategic integration. Train managers on the exact workflows, then require them to coach and inspect.

Top Tools

OpenAI’s Latest Update

OpenAI’s latest model, GPT‑5.2, is now available in ChatGPT for paid users. The update focuses on practical improvements in speed, accuracy, and structure—especially for business and operational tasks.

Accuracy
GPT‑5.2 Thinking responses contained 30% fewer errors than the previous version when tested on anonymized user queries. For customer messaging, research, or internal documentation, this means less time spent correcting the AI’s output.

Long-form reasoning
In GDPval, a benchmark of 44 structured knowledge work tasks, GPT‑5.2 Thinking performed at or above human expert level in 70.9% of evaluations. Tasks included creating slides, writing summaries, and drafting business reports.

OpenAI

Efficiency
On those same tasks, GPT‑5.2 produced usable results 11x faster and at under 1% of the cost of a human expert. In day-to-day workflows, that translates to quicker drafts with less overhead.

Structured work
GPT‑5.2 Thinking showed a 9.3% improvement in spreadsheet modeling tasks compared to GPT‑5.1. Formatting, layout, and formula accuracy improved, which is useful for performance tracking, budgeting, or sales reports.

Visual understanding
The model now performs better on tasks involving charts and software interfaces, cutting visual reasoning error rates nearly in half. This can help with interpreting dashboards, diagrams, or screenshots during tech support and reporting.

Ultimately, outputs may take a bit longer, but the added structure and reliability support more confident use in real workflows.

Prompt of the Week

One of the fastest ways to improve AI output is to improve the way you ask for it.

Most prompts are too vague. They skip context, assume the tool knows the goal, and leave out what to avoid. The result is usually a decent draft that still needs heavy editing.

This week’s prompt framework fixes that. It gives your team a clear way to shape the request before hitting enter. Use it to get faster, more focused results with fewer rewrites.

Please generate [what do you want?]

Assume [what world does this piece live in?]

Optimize for [if this can only accomplish one thing, what should it do?]

Avoid [what irks you, your audience, or your brand?]

Additional context: [paste drafts, notes, examples, or constraints here]

Hear from the Experts

A friend’s passing prompted Will Bright to ask one question: Why don’t most cars on the road have the safety tech that could save lives?

What he uncovered was staggering—road fatalities up 50% over the past decade, only 10% of vehicles equipped with modern pedestrian detection, and a 40+ year timeline before OEM technology reaches the full U.S. fleet.

So, he built Safe Ride: a palm-sized retrofit that gives almost any car built since 2010 automatic braking, lane centering, adaptive cruise, and 100-meter pedestrian detection.

Learn more about how it works during our convo here.

Bits and Bytes

Reply

or to participate.