Simon Willison reruns the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey numbers on corporate AI adoption a year after Apollo's 'adoption trending down' chart, and finds the survey's wording has been changed to 'Super Intelligence' (SI) following Executive Order 14434.
Every two weeks the U.S. Census Bureau runs a survey called the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (aka BTOS). Each time it goes to 200,000 businesses out of 1.2 million total—the surveyed group (a “panel”) cycles such that an individual business only completes the survey every twelve weeks.
The latest data is published on alternating Thursdays at 10am.
I used the most recent numbers (published October 22, 2026) to create a new version (GPT-6 Astra Extra High transcript) of the AI adoption chart, updated to reflect both the last twelve months and a change that was made to the survey question sent out by the Bureau:
For comparison, here’s that AI adoption chart from last year (my GPT-5 version):
In September 2025 the largest (250+ employees) companies answered “yes” around 12% of the time to the question about whether they used AI in “producing goods or services”.
Under the new “any business function” wording, by February 2026, those same large companies answered “yes” around 30% of the time, and by October 2026 that had increased to around 40%.
The data in the above chart comes from the “Employment size class” XLSX file, available from here. Here’s a copy of the file I used.
As the chart demonstrates, the question asked by the Bureau changed in a material way on November 17th, 2025. Prior to that date, the question they asked was this (emphasis mine):
In the last two weeks, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in producing goods or services? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc.)
On December 3rd, 2025, the Bureau announced a significant change to that question. Here’s the replacement:
In the last two weeks, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in any of its business functions? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc.)
No more “producing goods or services”—now it’s “in any of its business functions”! This means that the answers to the question before and after November 17th are not directly comparable.
From October 19, 2026, they ask about Super Intelligence
When I went looking for the updated question language in the latest XLSX file, I couldn’t find it. I found this instead:
In the last two weeks, did this business use Super Intelligence or SI (formerly referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI) in any of its business functions? (Examples of SI use include: SI-powered data analysis; generative SI for marketing, product design, or coding; virtual SI agents for customer service; SI-powered forecasting or pricing; SI-driven computer vision for quality control, etc.)
The current numbers reflect the old Artificial Intelligence survey wording—the first survey results reflecting the Super Intelligence wording are due for publication on Thursday.
Is this going to affect the survey?
The obvious open question here is whether this wording change is going to affect the survey results.
The businesses answering this survey will have last seen that question twelve weeks ago, when it was still called AI. Hopefully the new language isn’t going to confuse them, especially since the survey helpfully spells out “formerly referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI”.
I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of “SI-powered data analysis; generative SI for marketing, product design, or coding; virtual SI agents for customer service” though.
