Economic Impacts of AI on Enterprise IT Organizations
We analyzed 85.5 million Perplexity Enterprise queries over twelve months to understand what AI usage reveals about hidden IT demand.
Key Things Covered
Why technology is one of the largest categories of enterprise AI usage, and why software, cloud, networking, security, and troubleshooting questions make up a consistent share of employee demand.
How AI query behavior reveals hidden IT support volume through repeat questions, ticket-like issues, and recurring friction across teams and tools.
What that invisible support load means for enterprise ROI, and why AI query data should be treated as a new source of IT intelligence.
Summary
Technology is one of the leading categories of enterprise AI usage, accounting for 18% of all queries in this dataset. More than three out of four of those questions resemble work an IT team would normally handle as tickets, yet they happen outside the service desk and rarely appear in IT metrics. The same problems show up repeatedly across users and teams, often around the same enterprise platforms organizations rely on most.
Under conservative assumptions, this hidden support volume represents on the order of $300 million in annual ticket-equivalent IT effort across the organizations analyzed. This paper argues that AI query data should be treated as a first-class source of IT intelligence: a live signal of where tooling, onboarding, and support are falling short.
