Only 5% of Workers Build Sophisticated AI Tools, Limiting Enterprise Gains

1 articles · Updated · Fortune · Aug 5

Roughly half of U.S. employees use AI at work, but only 15% use it daily and about 5% do higher-impact, iterative work, a gap Will Drover calls the “builder activation gap.”
That gap matters because one-off prompting delivers disposable productivity gains, while employees who build reusable agents, apps or automations can scale improvements across recurring workflows without coding.
Caroline Davis at Capital Factory illustrates the shift: her AI agent “Sunny” now connects email, calendar, Airtable and Google Sheets, cutting some data pulls from hours to 10 to 15 minutes.
Drover argues the main barrier is often identity rather than access or governance, with workers still seeing themselves as technology consumers even as no-code AI makes building far more accessible.
He says organizations should require a first build, make nontechnical builders visible and track outputs such as BBVA’s 20,000 custom GPTs—about 4,000 in frequent use—instead of relying on adoption metrics alone.