Illustration of the ChatGPT app from the iOS app store displayed on the phone screen.
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Despite the rapid adoption of large-scale language models like Openai’s ChatGpt, there is little comprehensive research that delves into exactly how technology is used in everyday life.
On Tuesday, researchers, including Openai researchers, published their first study examining people using ChatGpt and what objectives they looked at based on internal messages sent to ChatGpt regarding consumer planning.
Among the key findings from the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Working Paper are the surge in non-labor-related messages, jumping to 73% in June 2025 from 53% a year ago.
In a LinkedIn post, Openai’s chief economist Aaron Chatterji said the shift was a signal that ChatGpt has become part of many aspects of people’s lives.
“We are still learning how people use AI in the wild, but this trend gives us a glimpse into where the value lies and how it changes,” he added.
The study has not been formally vetted or peer-reviewed by other researchers, written by Openai’s economic research team and Harvard economist David Deming, and is said to be based on a “large-scale privacy presentation analysis of 1.5 million conversations.”
This is an overview of some of the most notable revelations.
What are the most common use cases?
Although ChatGpt can theoretically be used for complex working tasks such as coding, this study found that consumer use of chatbots is primarily about “achieving everyday tasks.”
Three-quarters of the conversations with ChatGPT, monitored by the researchers, were determined to fall into three broad categories: “Practical guidance, seeking writing for information.”
Practical guidance has been found to be the most common use case. These applications include personalized tutoring and education, how-to advice and the demand for creative ideas.
However, use cases vary depending on whether the chatbot is being used in the workplace. For example, writing activity is found to be the most common use case in the workplace, accounting for 40% of work-related messages on average in June.
Meanwhile, rather than just writing things from scratch using ChatGpt, about two-thirds of all written messages asked the chatbot to perform editing, critique and translation of existing text.
This study also examined the use patterns of ChatGPT in the context of “quest, do, express.”
As of July, about half of all messages were sorted into the “Question” category. Researchers suggest that people value chatgpt most as advisors as well as task completion.
However, for work-related messages, approximately 56% were classified as “executed.” In other words, chatbots were used to perform certain job tasks such as writing.
“Writing is a common task for almost all white-collar jobs, and excellent written communication skills are one of the top ‘soft’ skills that employers require,” the paper states.
The impact of AI models on the workplace has been a hot topic since CHATGPT launched for consumers in November 2022. This raises concerns that technology will be used to replace workers.
However, the researchers argued that, at least in the case of the consumer ChatGPT, it showed that it was primarily used to improve workers’ judgment and productivity, not primarily in knowledge-intensive jobs, rather than exchanging all tasks.
Who is using it?
According to the survey, it noted that as of July, ChatGpt’s user base had grown to 10% of the world’s adult population.
Meanwhile, the demographic collapse of these ChatGPT users has shifted, and chatbots have slowly become universal across gender and borders.
For example, data from January 2024 showed that 37% of users typically have names that can be read as masculine or female, among users with masculine names.
However, as of mid-2025, the gender gap is consistent with the general adult demographics, and we know that women’s adoption is dramatically narrowing.
Additionally, ChatGpt is easily accessible worldwide, growing rapidly, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
This has resulted in the ChatGPT adoption growth rate of the lowest income countries, growing more than four times as high-income countries as of May 2025.
In addition to offering a variety of paid tiers on its consumer platform, CHATGPT also offers enterprise products for businesses, API access and software engineering agents called Codex.
ChatGpt has experienced explosive growth in recent years, but has encountered increased competition from rivals such as Elon Musk’s Xai and Google’s Gemini.
Just this week, Gemini made a leap with ChatGpt after the launch of the “Nano Banana” image editor model in August, among the free apps on Apple’s App Store.
