How People Use ChatGPT. Aaron Chatterji, Tom Cunningham, David Deming, Zo¨e Hitzig1, Christopher Ong, Carl Shan, Kevin Wadman. OpenAI. Duke University. Harvard University. September 15, 2025. “Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We document the growth of ChatGPT’s consumer product from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025, when it had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population. Early adopters were disproportionately male but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and we find higher growth rates in lower-income countries. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline, we classify usage patterns within a representative sample of ChatGPT conversations. We find steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in non-work-related messages, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage. Work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations. We classify messages by conversation topic and find that “Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing” are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use. Overall, we find that ChatGPT provides economic value through decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs.”
See also Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption. Sep 15, 2025. …”We find:
- Education and science usage shares are on the rise: While the use of Claude for coding continues to dominate our total sample at 36%, educational tasks surged from 9.3% to 12.4%, and scientific tasks from 6.3% to 7.2%.
- Users are entrusting Claude with more autonomy: “Directive” conversations, where users delegate complete tasks to Claude, jumped from 27% to 39%. We see increased program creation in coding (+4.5pp) and a reduction in debugging (-2.9pp)—suggesting that users might be able to achieve more of their goals in a single exchange…”
See also ZDNET – In 2 years, half of all service calls will be resolved by AI – survey Service pros agree: AI agents are revolutionizing the service industry by boosting efficiency, cutting costs, and improving customer satisfaction. But just one example – AI Customer Service at Verizon Leaves Users More Frustrated Than Helped [h/t Pete Weiss]
