Industry surveyStack Overflow, 2025
52% say AI tools or agents improved their productivity at least somewhat
Workflow & automation
52%
of respondents say AI tools or AI agents have had a positive effect on their productivity
- Reader Note:
- Figure base is 31,636 respondents. The question asks, "Have AI tools or AI agents changed how you complete development work in the past year?" The source's 52% summary combines "Yes, to a great extent" (16.3%) and "Yes, somewhat" (35.3%) and describes these as a positive effect on productivity. The report does not say when the survey ran.
- Evidence:
- Self-reported behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- Survey respondents on Stack Overflow; most charts show roughly 26,000 to 34,000 responses, with smaller subsets for AI agent users and specific follow-up questions.
Good for
A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.
Not for
- Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- The source never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.




