Over the past year or so, we and most people we know, all have explored ChatGPT or Perplexity or some such AI tool in our lives – professional and personal, to varying degrees and increasingly so. But what do the 700m users on ChatGPT, the most popular of them all, with 2.5bn daily messages actually use it for?
“OpenAI’s Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Deming) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks.”
For those interested in the whole research paper, you can access it here. But in this article, Arstechnica helps us with some interesting takeaways.
First, data about the exponential growth in its use: “ChatGPT passed 100 million users in early 2024, climbed past 400 million users early this year, and currently can boast over 700 million users, or “nearly 10% of the world’s adult population… All those new users are also leading to significant increases in just how many messages OpenAI processes daily, which has gone up from about 451 million in June 2024 to over 2.6 billion in June…To give that number some context, Google announced in March that it averages 14 billion searches per day, and that’s after decades as the undisputed leader in Internet search.”
The paper throws some light on the demographics of its users – predominantly young and male. But what they use it for is more than just work: “Despite all the talk about LLMs potentially revolutionizing the workplace, a significant majority of all ChatGPT use has nothing to do with business productivity, according to OpenAI. Non-work tasks (as identified by an LLM-based classifier) grew from about 53 percent of all ChatGPT messages in June of 2024 to 72.2 percent as of June 2025, according to the study.”
Unsurprisingly, a lot of users use it for writing: “Across 1.1 million conversations dating from May 2024 to June 2025, a full 28 percent dealt with writing assistance in some form or another, OpenAI said. That rises to a whopping 42 percent for the subset of conversations tagged as work-related (by far the most popular work-related task), and a majority, 52 percent, of all work-related conversations from users with “management and business occupations.””
Another popular use case often used to sound the death knell for Google is search: “In June 2024, about 14 percent of all ChatGPT conversations were tagged as relating to “seeking information.” By June 2025, that number had risen to 24.4 percent”
Here’s the worrying piece given the persistent inaccuracies with GenAI – a lot of users are using it to make decisions: “Getting help editing an email is one thing, but asking ChatGPT to help you make a business decision is another altogether. Across work-related conversations, OpenAI says a significant 14.9 percent dealt with “making decisions and solving problems.” That’s second only to “documenting and recording information” for work-related ChatGPT conversations among the dozens of “generalized work activity” categories classified by O*NET.
This was true across all the different occupation types OpenAI looked at, which the company suggests means people are “using ChatGPT as an advisor or research assistant, not just a technology that performs job tasks directly.””
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