OpenAI ChatGPT-5 introduction displayed on smartphone screen

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Here’s how people are actually using ChatGPT

The new report released in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research offers one of the largest surveys of real-world AI chatbot use.

Jon Keegan

9/15/25 2:51PM

OpenAI has released its largest report yet on how real people are actually using ChatGPT. The fascinating working research paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, describes a wide-ranging study that used AI to analyze 1 million chat transcripts (no humans read any of the chats). The study has not been peer reviewed.

Some of the big takeaways from the paper:

💃 70% (!!!) of all queries were not related to work. That number may send a chill down the spine of Big Tech, as it’s betting on enterprise AI to generate enough revenue to justify the hundreds of billions it’s spending to build out AI infrastructure.
📝 Among work-related messages, the most common use for ChatGPT is writing, and mostly just to modify or improve a user’s text. Writing queries made up 42% of work-related messages and 52% of all messages from users who work in business and management.
🙋🏻 About half (49%) of all queries were classified as “asking” — for guidance, advice, or information. 40% of messages were requests classified as “doing,” or asking the chatbot to complete a task.
👩‍💻 Female users contributed more than half of all queries, as of July 2025. This is a massive shift from early on, when the vast majority of users were male. But it’s worth noting that the study determined this by classifying first names as masculine or feminine.
🛹 The youth loves AI. Half of all messages were from adults under 26.

The OpenAI researchers took a random sample of about 1 million messages between May 2024 and June 2025 from logged-in, adult ChatGPT users (who did not opt out of sharing their messages for training).

ChatGPT usage - Breakdown of tasks by topic. — Breakdown of tasks by topic (Chart: OpenAI/NBER)

This study is one of the largest surveys of real-world AI use, so this data will be of great interest to all the companies trying to figure out how they’re going to make money selling AI services.

One thing that stood out was how utilitarian the usage of AI was. Rather than falling in love with an AI chatbot or having deep conversations with your new AI buddy, it looks like people are just using it to make their work better and figure things out.

It remains to be seen how AI will end up being part of our everyday lives, but it might look a lot more boring than Silicon Valley is making it out to be.

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