AI might one day replace us all — for now though, humans still spend a lot of time cleaning up its mess, according to a Workday survey released Wednesday.

Why it matters: The promise of AI is that it makes work more productive, but the reality is proving more complex and less rosy.

Zoom in: For employees, AI is both speeding up work and creating more of it, finds the report conducted by HR software company Workday last November.

• 85% of respondents said that AI saved them 1-7 hours a week, but about 37% of that time savings is lost to what they call "rework" — correcting errors, rewriting content and verifying output.
• Only 14% of respondents said they get consistently positive outcomes from AI.
• Workday surveyed 3,200 employees who said they are using AI — half in leadership positions — at companies in North America, Europe and Asia with at least $100 million in revenue and 150 employees.

Reality check: The report did not specify which AI products respondents were using or which companies built them.

Zoom out: "There is a big productivity paradox," Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product at Workday, tells Axios.

• The most frequent users of AI, he says, are the ones investing the most time in reviewing and correcting what it produces.
• The findings line up with other studies that call AI productivity gains into question — from MIT and Harvard Business Review.
• The term "workslop" has caught on for a reason.

Friction point: Typically, the better someone gets at using a technology, the more efficient they become. But with AI, as you get more proficient, you start to understand more about the ways in which the tech can go wrong, Kazmaier says.

• He points to people who might run the same prompts across multiple AI models — and check the outcomes against each other.

The big picture: CEOs and employers are super eager to reap the productivity benefits of AI — particularly so they can bring down labor costs.

• But for now, AI is mainly being used as an excuse to conduct layoffs that are due to other factors, says Rob Hornby, co-CEO of consultancy AlixPartners.
• In a survey, also out Wednesday from his firm, 95% of CEOs said they expected to conduct layoffs in the next five years because of AI. That's likely more hope than reality. CEOs aren't yet seeing productivity gains from AI, he says.

Yes, but: There are some productivity benefits to AI in some specific niche areas, like some types of low-level commoditized writing, he says. But overall, "we're having a tough time proving out real productivity benefits," Hornby says.

• Plus: AI tools are rapidly getting better at doing real-world work, so the problem could soon resolve itself. Anthropic's new tool designed to automate rote office tasks was created in less than 1.5 weeks and the code was written entirely by AI.

Between the lines: Incorporating and using a new technology effectively simply takes a lot of time — ask anyone who lived through the advent of the Internet.

• It takes time for employees to learn new tools, for employers to integrate them and for businesses to build products that actually make them useful.
• Workday and other enterprise tech firms are trying to sell AI-based software products to solve that latter piece.

The bottom line: AI is creating a productivity paradox — speeding up work, while quietly adding more of it.

The world's understanding of how President Trump intends to wield the American military and influence the industry that arms it changed dramatically in two weeks flat.

The big picture: In the earliest days of the new year, the commander in chief dispatched troops to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and warned Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Mexico they could be next.

• He also hinted at another round of action in Iran, a symptom of his growing affinity for military force. Another sign: Nigeria was the seventh country bombed in less than a year.
• Asked about guardrails to global power, Trump told the New York Times: "My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
• "I don't need international law," he added. "I'm not looking to hurt people."

Meanwhile, Trump menaced the contracts of the world's second-largest defense company, sought to suspend dividends and stock buybacks across the sector, and demanded investments in "plants and equipment" and speedier weapons production.

• At the same time, Trump floated a record $1.5 trillion military budget.
• The president wants new warships on the sea and space-based interceptors in the sky on his terms and his expedited timeline.

Driving the news: All of it. All at once. All over the world.

The other side: Critics worry Trump is spreading his attention — and that of the military — in too many scattershot directions.

• "China just conducted its largest military exercise in three decades. Since 2010, their power production, with a huge emphasis on nuclear and solar, has increased by more than the rest of the world combined. Now we're sending them H200s," Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) told Axios, referring to Nvidia's advanced chips.
• "And yet we're stuck in the past, focused yet again on half-baked, regime-change wars for oil fought with conventional weapons, while our grid falls even further behind."

Zoom out: A $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would push defense spending to its highest levels since the end of the Cold War.

• The proposal easily clears previous allocations, at roughly 5% of GDP.
• It quickly won support from the chairmen of the House and Senate armed services committees.
• The nuance? While Trump wants to flood money into the defense sector, he also wants to shape how it's spent.

Follow the money: Prohibitions on stock buybacks, dividends and compensation "are truly unprecedented, as far as I can tell," Jerry McGinn at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Axios.

• "I have no idea how they would be enforced and many have questioned their legality. Seems to be more of a shot across the bow."
• "Bottom line, the president is looking to strengthen the defense industrial base through increased investment and better performance by both companies and the government," McGinn said.

Go deeper: What MAGA means for the Pentagon and its weapons

Having fewer ports makes laptops and tablets lighter and more affordable — but that also cuts down on your connectivity options. If you’ve got a MacBook Air, a slim Chromebook or a tablet you’d like to get more utility out of, a USB-C hub can help. Using just a single port on your device, these multiport adapters will let you hook up screens, tap into Ethernet cables, connect mice and keyboards, and transfer data to drives and memory cards. Most also give you a way to power your device through the hub to maximize port availability. We tested over a dozen models to come up with picks for every budget. Here are the best USB-C hubs, according to our tests.

Table of contents

• Best USB-C hubs for 2026

• What to look for in a USB-C hub

• How we test USB-C hubs

• Other hubs we tested 

• Recent updates

Best USB-C hubs for 2026

What to look for in a USB-C hub

Hub vs docking station

The first thing to decide is whether you need a USB-C hub or a USB-C docking station. There’s no set standard for what differentiates the two, but docking stations tend to have more ports, offer a separate DC power adapter and cost more, with some reaching upwards of $400. We have a separate guide to the best docking stations to check out if you’re looking for something bigger than what we’re discussing here. USB-C hubs, in contrast, have between four and 10 ports, can support pass-through charging and typically cost between $30 and $150.

Hubs, sometimes also called dongles or even multiport adapters, make more sense for smaller setups with just a few peripherals, such as a monitor, a wired keyboard and mouse, and the occasional external drive. They’re also more portable, since they’re small and require no dedicated power. That could be useful if you change work locations but want to bring your accessories with you, or if you want to replace your laptop with a more powerful tablet. A docking station or Thunderbolt dock makes more sense for someone who needs a robust setup for their laptop, including multiple external monitors, webcams, stream decks, microphones and so on.

Both docks and hubs make it easy to grab your laptop off your desk for a meeting or other brief relocation and when you get back, you only need to plug in one cable to get all your accessories reconnected. Of course, if you just need to plug in one peripheral, you may not need a hub or a dock, a simple USB-C adapter, like HDMI to USB-C or USB-A to USB-C, may do the trick.

Ports

For a USB-C hub to work, it needs to connect to a port on your laptop or tablet that supports video, data and power — all of which is covered by anything listed as USB 3.0 or better, including USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4. The port, of course, needs to be Type-C as well. The sea of laptops out there is vast, so it’s hard to make generalizations, but modern laptops, including Windows and Apple models, should have at least one USB-C port that will suffice, and indeed, every one of our top picks for the best laptops do — including our top pick, the M4 MacBook Air.

Next, it’s a matter of finding a good USB-C hub that has the right connections for your needs. Most hubs offer some combo of HDMI, USB, SD card reader, Ethernet and 3.5 mm ports. If you have a 4K monitor and would like at least a 60Hz refresh rate, you’ll need a hub with an HDMI 2.0 port — HDMI 1.4 only goes up to 30Hz. HDMI 2.1 will handle 4K at up to 120Hz, but hubs that have adopted that standard aren’t as common just yet. Keep in mind that a low refresh rate can cause your screen to feel laggy, making your mouse appear glitchy and your webcam movements to look delayed.

Additional USB ports on these accessories are usually USB Type-A or USB Type-C. They can support data with different transfer rates, typically 5Gbps or 10Gbps. Some ports only handle passthrough power and no data, and some can do data, power and video, so it’s best to check the spec list to make sure you’re getting the support you need. Keep in mind that a hub may bill itself as a 7-in-1, but one of those ports may not be usable for anything other than charging.

Standard SD and microSD cards are useful for transferring data from cameras and the like or for offloading files from your hard drive, and many hubs have those slots. Ethernet ports may deliver faster internet speeds than your Wi-Fi and a hub with a 3.5mm jack can bring back the wired headphone connection that some laptops have ditched.

Power delivery

Nearly all of the USB-C hubs I tested support passthrough charging. That means if your laptop or tablet only charges via USB, you don’t have to take up another port on your laptop to keep everything topped up. Unlike a docking station, powering a hub is optional. The one exception is if you want to close the lid on your laptop while you work on an external monitor. Most computers will go into sleep mode if the lid is closed without power, so either the laptop or the hub will need to be plugged into the wall to prevent that from happening.

Many of the newer hubs include a 100W USB-C power delivery (PD) port, with a healthy 80 to 85 watts going to your Mac, PC, iPad or Android tablet (the hubs take a little of the juice for themselves, hence the 15-watt or so difference). In my tests, a powered USB hub ran hotter than when it wasn't passing the charge through, so I prefer to power the computer directly using its own charger. But for tablets or other devices with no extra ports, that PD option is important.

Some PD ports are also data ports — which is both good and bad. On one hand, it feels wasteful to use a perfectly good data port just for boring old electricity. But on the other hand, USB-C connections that only carry a charge are less versatile, and it makes it seem like it has more accessory hookups than it actually does.

Design

There’s surprisingly little design variation among hubs. Most look like a flat slab, a little smaller than a smartphone, and have an attached Type-C host cable. The hues range from a silvery black to a silvery gray. Some are thinner than others, some have all ports on one edge and some have ports on both sides. All of this is just to say that aesthetics probably won’t make or break your buying decision.

One variation that could tip the scales is the length of the cable. A longer one will give you more freedom as you arrange the hub on your desk, potentially even letting you hide it behind your laptop. Or you may prefer a shorter one to keep the hub neatly set beside your laptop.

How we test USB-C hubs

Before we test anything, we take a look at what’s available and how they’ve been received by shoppers, forum-goers and other publications. I became familiar with a few reputable brands when I was testing docking stations, so I looked into hubs from those companies as well. I focused on items that would help with an average day of productivity — not high-end setups or demanding gaming situations. Once I settled on a dozen or so that would make good candidates, I had them shipped to my humble office in the desert and started testing them out over the course of a few weeks.

I used an M1 MacBook Pro running MacOS Sonoma as the host computer and plugged in accessories that include a 4K Dell monitor, a ZSA USB-C ergo keyboard, a Logitech USB-A gaming mouse, an Elgato USB-C 4K webcam, a Logitech streaming light, a USB-A 3.0 Sandisk thumb drive, a USB-C Samsung T7 Shield external drive and a pair of wired headphones I got for free on an airplane (I should probably invest in some wired headphones, but the cord dangling on my chest drives me nutty so all my earbuds are wireless). I used high-end HDMI and USB-C cables to ensure that any data or connectivity issues weren’t related to my equipment.

Then I put each USB-C hub through a gamut of basic tests. I looked at what could be plugged in at once, the resolution on the monitor, data transfer speeds, the overall build quality of the hub and general usability factors, like the placement of the ports and the length of the cords. And, finally, the price-to-value ratio helped determine the best ones for a few different use cases.

Other hubs we tested

HyperDrive Next 10 Port USB-C Hub

There’s a lot to like about HyperDrive’s Next 10 Port USB-C Hub. The tethered cable is a lavish 13 inches long, the HDMI 2.0 port outputs clear and crisp 4K visuals at 60Hz and the high-speed data transfers are great. It has the coveted two USB-C data ports plus a PD port, and there’s even a headphone jack. The only thing that holds back a full-throated endorsement is the way our unit handled a streaming light. Having it on at full brightness made the webcam flicker every time. The issue went away at 75 percent brightness, but the same problem didn’t happen on any other hub I tested.

Anker 341 USB-C Hub (7-in-1)

There’s nothing wrong with the Anker 341 USB-C hub. In fact it’s a current recommendation in our iPad accessories guide and it comes at a great $35 price. It gives you two USB-A ports as well as SD slots. But at this point, a 1.4 HDMI connection, which only supports 4K resolution at 30Hz feels a little retro. There’s also just a single USB-C downstream port and the data transfer tests proved to be a touch slower than the other hubs. But if you’ve got a lower resolution monitor and don’t need more than one USB-C, you won’t be disappointed with it.

Anker 555 8-in-1

It was a tough call between the UGreen Revodoc Pro 109 and the Anker 555 8-in-1 for our top recommendation. Both have a similar port array with an HDMI, Ethernet, two USB Type A, a PD USB-C and a USB-C 3.2 on the 555. And the Anker USB-C hub is $15 cheaper. We went with the UGreen hub for its more premium build, extra USB-A port and longer cord that gives you two extra inches to work with. But if you want to save a few bucks this hub is a worthwhile pick. 

Startech 4-Port USB-C Hub (data only)

I only became aware of Startech when I started researching for this guide. The quality is decent and the yellow accents are a welcome bit of color in the otherwise very gray world of hubs. The performance is solid, with no hiccups that I encountered. The brand’s 4-Port USB-C Hub has a long cord that wraps around the hub itself, which is unique. It doesn’t bother with power delivery, which isn’t an issue if you can power your computer directly. But the four USB ports (three Type-A and one Type-C) max out at 5Gbps and there’s no HDMI connector. It goes for $46, and unfortunately for it, there are cheaper ways to get a few more USB ports for your setup.

Recent updates

January 2026: Added an honorable mention from Satechi.