A major new report from professional services firm Deloitte has found that a majority of workers in Northern Ireland have used generative AI (GenAI) at work, but a significant proportion of this group have done so without their employer’s explicit permission.
The data indicates that six in ten (61%) working adults aged 18-75 in NI have have used GenAI for work, with 38% of workers doing so at least once weekly, and 21% of workers utilising it at least once every day.
While adoption and usage in Northern Ireland is broadly in line with the rest of the UK, London continues to lead the way. Over half (55%) of respondents from London use the technology weekly, with 37% doing so at least every day.
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Of GenAI users surveyed in NI, 65% use tools their employer has given permission to use. But 22% said they use tools without their firm’s knowledge that they think their employers would approve of and 10% said they use tools their employer wouldn’t sign off on. Only 5% said they used tools that had been banned in their workplace.
The findings come from Deloitte UK’s inaugural GenAI Workforce Survey, which surveyed 25,000 workers across the UK, including more than 600 respondents working in Northern Ireland, between 7th May and 10th June 2026, to understand how they are using GenAI in their jobs and how organisations are responding. The survey will be repeated every six months to monitor how usage evolves as the technology becomes more widely adopted.
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While over four in ten (42%) GenAI users said the technology has saved them time, a further 35% said they expect it to in future. Only 16% said that using Gen AI at work does not save them time, and they don't expect that to change.
However, the research also indicates that GenAI users in NI are largely using the technology to support everyday activities rather than innovation, with the top three use cases being searching for information (42%), drafting emails (37%) and fact checking (32%).
Almost a third (30%) of NI employees say their employer encourages the use of AI in the workplace and a third (34%) of NI employees have already received formal training from their employer on how to use GenAI at work.
When asked what could be done to increase GenAI usage, almost a quarter (23%) of NI workers indicated that they would like clearer guidance on the acceptable use of GenAI at work.
On training specifically, 27% said they would like to know how to how to evaluate/fact-check GenAI outputs. A fifth would like advanced GenAI training, with 24% requesting cybersecurity training related to Gen AI.
Policy and leadership
Northern Ireland has kept pace in terms of governance, with a third of NI employees claiming their employers have an AI policy, in line with the UK average, and among those, 88% know what that policy is.
However, only 35% of employees who use Gen AI at work think their leaders have a good understanding of GenAI, while 30% went as far as to say their leaders talk about GenAI but have a poor understanding of how to use it.
Approaching with caution
Workers in NI appear to be concerned with succession planning, with 59% worried about how the next generation of people in roles like theirs will develop skills if GenAI does many tasks for them, compared to the 55% UK average.
When asked to think about using GenAI for work across a number of listed areas, concerns around the misuse of personal data/privacy were cited by almost half of those surveyed (49%), as well as over-reliance on the use of Gen AI reducing human control (48%) and inaccuracy of results (43%).
A quarter (25%) of NI workers think there is a stigma attached to using GenAI in their workplace, and 48% think objectives aimed at increasing user’s proficiency of GenAI should not feature in annual appraisals (above the 42% national average).
Marie Doyle, Office Senior Partner at Deloitte in Belfast said: “The story we’re seeing from our GenAI Workforce survey is that Northern Ireland employees are relatively well informed about generative AI tools, with a third receiving training from their employers, which should be seen as a positive.
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“Northern Ireland has also kept pace with the rest of the UK on governance but as in many regions outside London, the use of GenAI tools has been a slow burn here and is being used principally for perfunctory tasks, such as searching for information and writing emails rather than transforming how work gets done.
“There is a real opportunity here for NI companies to encourage the use of GenAI. With nearly a third of respondents claiming they are using AI tools without their employers’ knowledge, it is clear some employees are moving faster than their employers in terms of recognising what tools are most useful.
“The organisations that will gain the greatest advantage from AI will be those that move beyond simply providing access to tools and focus on helping people use them to their full potential with the appropriate guardrails and purpose.”
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