An Empirical Investigation of AI Adoption and Perception among IT Professionals

This study investigates the adoption/perception of AI tools among IT professionals based on a survey collected by Stack Overflow in May 2024 of 45,162 respondents. The results show that the majority of IT professionals are currently using AI tools in their development workflow and that the most common use of AI is in writing code, searching for answers, debugging, and getting help. The top benefits of using AI tools are increasing productivity, speeding up learning, and improving efficiency. The most cited challenges are lack of trust in the output generated by AI tools and lack of contextual understanding in AI tools. The top 3 ethical concerns are the circulation of misinformation, missing or incorrect attribution for sources of data, and biased results that do not represent diverse viewpoints. The results also show the adoption of AI tools differ by demographic information. For the top 5 counties with the most respondents, Ukraine and India have a higher AI adoption rate than the USA, Germany and the UK combined. Fintech, software development, and healthcare are the industries that are experiencing the highest rate of adoption of AI tools. The results reveal that people in younger age groups, less experienced coders, people with lower annual salaries, and employees working for small organizations tend to adopt AI tools at higher rates than other groups.