Ranked: UK occupations most likely to pay for their own AI assistant
From IT professionals and teachers to musicians and fitness instructors: new research by the University of Warwick ranks the occupations with the highest personal paid AI use.
Which UK workers are most likely to pay for ChatGPT or Claude out of their own pocket? Who Pays for AI?, a new study by economists at Warwick and Imperial College London, uses anonymised bank and card transactions to examine the UK’s growing use of paid AI assistants.
The researchers compare occupations by the estimated share of workers with an active personal AI subscription.
They identified occupations using professional membership and registration payments, alongside employer records.
The study covers personal payments, not employer-paid licences, business-account payments or free AI use.
Among the 34 occupations with enough data to report, paid AI adoption varied twelvefold, with IT professionals having the greatest share of payments for AI tools at 20.3% and social care workers having the least share, at 1.7%.
The twenty occupations most likely to pay for an AI assistant were identified as:
- IT professionals – 20.3%
- University & college lecturers – 16.0%
- Finance & insurance professionals – 15.8%
- Project & procurement managers – 13.8%
- Marketing & PR professionals – 12.8%
- Writers, artists & producers – 9.7%
- Surveyors & town planners – 8.2%
- Postal & telecoms workers – 7.7%
- Chartered engineers – 7.5%
- School teachers – 7.5%
- Security officers – 7.0%
- Medical doctors – 7.0%
- Pharmacists – 6.8%
- Psychotherapists & counsellors – 6.8%
- Musicians – 6.7%
- Human resources professionals – 6.5%
- Fitness instructors – 6.1%
- Actors & stage performers – 5.8%
- Scientists & R&D engineers – 4.9%
- Banking staff – 4.9%
Who Pays for AI? estimates that one in 20 UK adults – around 2.8 million people – pay for artificial intelligence tools, with subscriber numbers roughly doubling each year. UK consumer spending on AI products has grown from almost nothing in early 2023 to a billion-pound annual market.
The study finds that AI assistant choice also varies by occupation. Claude has a stronger following among software and IT workers, engineers, finance professionals and academics, while teachers, healthcare workers and HR staff tend to favour ChatGPT. ChatGPT still has the largest subscriber base, but Claude is gaining ground: its share of directly billed subscription spending rose from 7% to 29% between December 2025 and July 2026, partly reflecting uptake of higher-priced plans.
Commenting on their results, Dr Peter Lambert from University of Warwick’s Department of Economics said: “Millions of people are now putting their hands into their own pockets to pay for AI every month. In little more than three years, these tools have become a billion-pound consumer market in the UK. This surge has been phenomenal and with only one in twenty adults currently subscribing, there’s still room for further growth. The big question is how many people currently using free AI tools will eventually decide they are worth paying for.”
Dr Nikhil Datta from the University of Warwick’s Department of Economics added: “People whose jobs involve tasks that AI can help with are more likely to pay for it themselves, so that suggests people are buying these tools partly for what they can do for them at work. The first paying customers were disproportionately men and high earners, but that picture is changing rapidly with women now making up nearly half of new subscribers.”
Dr Patrick Schneider from Imperial Business School said: “Like many early-stage markets, the picture can change very quickly. ChatGPT still leads at present, but its early dominance is shrinking. Claude captured almost a third of consumer subscription spending by July, up from just 7% seven months earlier.”
