How People Really Use ChatGPT: Insights From OpenAI’s Economic Study

OpenAI just released a landmark report analyzing how hundreds of millions of people actually use ChatGPT.

The findings confirm some hunches—but also reveal surprising patterns about where AI is creating value today.

Adoption at Unprecedented Speed

• By July 2025, ChatGPT had 700 million users, sending 18 billion messages a week—around 10% of the world’s adult population.
  That pace of adoption has no historical precedent for consumer tech—not even smartphones or social media grew this quickly.

Who’s Using It?

• Early adopters were mostly male, but the gender gap has closed significantly.
• Faster growth is happening in lower-income countries, a sign that AI isn’t just a Western or elite phenomenon.

Work vs. Personal Use

• In mid-2024, usage was almost evenly split: 47% work vs. 53% personal.
  By mid-2025, the shift was clear: 73% personal vs. 27% work.
  Non-work use is growing faster than work use, showing AI’s impact on “home production” (personal productivity, life admin, learning, hobbies).

What People Actually Do With It

Three categories dominate 80% of all ChatGPT conversations:

1. Practical Guidance – tutoring, teaching, how-to advice, creative brainstorming.
2. Seeking Information – product research, recipes, current events, fact-checking (a direct Google substitute).
3. Writing – emails, documents, editing, summarizing, translating.

Work-specific insight: Writing is the #1 use case on the job, making up 40% of all work-related usage. Most of this isn’t generating content from scratch, but editing and improving human-written text.

Surprising Secondary Trends

• Tutoring/education accounts for about 10% of all messages—suggesting huge untapped potential in learning.
• Programming is a smaller share than expected. Despite hype about “AI coding assistants,” everyday users lean more on ChatGPT for writing and personal tasks.
• Self-expression (journaling, creative writing) is a niche but growing category.

The Economic Value

• Researchers estimate ChatGPT created at least $97B in consumer surplus in the U.S. in 2024 alone.
• The biggest impact isn’t just on corporate productivity—it’s in decision support and making knowledge-intensive tasks easier for individuals.

What This Means for Businesses

1. Don’t just look at workplace productivity. The fastest adoption is happening in personal life—habits formed there will shape expectations for work tools.
2. Writing is the killer app. If your business involves communication—emails, marketing, sales, documentation—AI writing/editing is already mainstream.
3. AI is a search disruptor. With “Seeking Information” as a top category, ChatGPT isn’t just a productivity tool—it’s an alternative to Google.
4. The real prize is workflow transformation. Right now, people mostly automate small tasks. The companies who re-engineer entire processes around AI will capture the next wave of value.

Final Thought

This report makes one thing clear: AI’s biggest impact so far is not in coding or replacing jobs—it’s in augmenting how people think, decide, and write.

For businesses, the challenge is moving from incremental use cases (editing an email, drafting a memo) to AI-native workflows that reimagine how work gets done. That’s where the competitive edge will be.