Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Deloitte puts UK workers' own spending on work GenAI tools at £958m a year
The firm's survey of 25,000 UK workers finds one in six GenAI users paying for at least one work tool out of their own pocket. Those purchases happen on personal cards, outside any procurement system.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Deloitte UK's first GenAI Workforce Survey polled 25,000 UK workers between 7 May and 10 June 2026, and the firm says it is the largest single-country study of workplace GenAI use.
- One in six GenAI users pay for at least one GenAI tool themselves for work purposes, and Deloitte estimates the resulting annual personal spend across UK workers at £958 million.
- Around half of employees using GenAI at work say they have had no formal training on using it safely, and 65% of users report a lack of convincing leadership on how it should be used.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Work done inside a personally bought account sits outside the employer's contract with the vendor, so a footprint assembled from licences and invoices will not show it at all.
- decision Buying out the tools staff already fund turns £958m of invisible spend into a visible budget line this year; leaving it alone means depending on employees to finance part of the workflow.
- cost Staff are carrying the subscription cost while the employer takes most of the time saved, and that arrangement lapses the moment an individual cancels a payment nobody in the company recorded.
- constraint With about half of users untrained, a policy that bars unapproved tools has little to redirect people toward until the training exists to support it.
The £958m is an estimate built from what 25,000 people told a survey fielded between 7 May and 10 June 2026, and Deloitte's release does not break it down per person. [5][1] Set it against the usage figure and the self-payers come to about one in ten UK working adults aged 18 to 70: 17% of the 63% who say they knowingly use GenAI for work. [16]
That group is invisible to both systems an employer would normally use to count its AI footprint. It went on a personal card and the employer is not the counterparty, so the purchase sits outside both finance's order book and the enterprise agreement. Any inventory assembled from licences and invoices will miss whatever the 17% are running. [4]
Deloitte reports the self-payers (17%) and the workers concealing their use (31%) as separate figures, and does not state how far the two overlap. [18][6] Both readings fit the published numbers. The people paying for their own tools could be employees whose managers know and approve, or they could be largely the same population as the 31%.
Hayley McKelvey, chief AI officer at Deloitte UK, said: "Workers who feel a stigma around adopting GenAI tools are more likely to conceal their use." [14] The survey supports that. Some 23% of workers think there is a stigma attached to using GenAI at work, and 64% of weekly users are worried managers will think GenAI can do their jobs. [10]
Workers claim to be saving an average of 70 minutes a week, and Deloitte says most of that saved time goes into doing more work for the same employer. [9] So the employer collects the return on spending it did not authorise and cannot see. The 70 minutes is self-reported.
Among users asked what kinds of tools they use, 46% named free tools against 34% on external tools their employer pays for, a gap of 12 percentage points. [3][17] Around half of those using GenAI at work say they have had no formal training in using it safely and effectively. [12] Paul Lee, partner and head of industry insight at Deloitte UK, said: "The story here isn't that workers are using GenAI, it's that they are using it despite limited training, patchy guidance and, in some cases, without their employer's knowledge." [15]
What to watch
- The next wave of the survey, which Deloitte says it will run every six months, and whether the self-pay share falls as employers provision more tools.
- Whether Deloitte publishes the overlap between the 17% self-payers and the 31% concealing their use, or a per-person spend figure behind the £958m.
- Whether the 46% on free tools narrows against the 34% on employer-paid external tools.