What the Best AI Users Do Differently—and How to Level Up All of Your Employees

Leaders often struggle to assess whether their employees are using AI successfully. Often, they default to measuring what’s easily observable: how much they’re using AI tools. To get a clearer picture, researchers partnered with KPMG and observed how 2,500 employees used LLMs over an eight-month period. They identified certain patterns that indicated sophisticated use: specific prompting strategies, clear and ambitious requests, and a level of comfort with the tools. They used these signals to better understand what set sophisticated users apart and found that top users: were ambitious with how they approached AI, treated it as a reasoning partner, delegated complex tasks with clear objectives, and treated AI as a general cognitive tool rather than a mere productivity tool. KPMG then used these findings to help the company advance from its already high adoption rate for AI to patterns of sophisticated use.