News Analysis
On the heels of Anthropic’s 2025 Economic Index report, which broke down global AI adoption trends centered around Claude, OpenAI researchers — paired with academics and the US National Bureau of Economic Research — released a study on how people use ChatGPT.
As of July 2025, ChatGPT boasts more than 700 million weekly active users and has been adopted by around 10% of the world's adult population.
Table of Contents
- 1. How Do People Use ChatGPT?
- 2. Who Is Using ChatGPT?
- 3. What Topics Are People Talking About?
- 5 Key Takeaways For Enterprise Leaders
- FAQs
1. How Do People Use ChatGPT?
In 2025, people using ChatGPT's consumer plans (Free, Plus, Pro) sent 5x more messages than in 2024, with a total of 18 billion messages sent each week.
Work vs. Non-Work Uses
In the enterprise, AI’s core value is in decision support, not just automation — which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs where better decision-making increases productivity. With the fast-growing number of people around the world using ChatGPT alone, it's highly likely employees are using generative AI tools, even if not officially sanctioned (AKA shadow AI).
The most common tasks workers use ChatGPT for include:
- Writing (40%)
- Practice Guidance (24%)
- Technical Help (10%)
These three types of activities are common across nearly all job types, suggesting AI can be a copilot or advisor more than just an automator.
While people in all roles and industries use ChatGPT, those with the greatest use include:
- Computer-related (57%)
- Management and business (50%)
- Engineering and science (48%)
User Intent (Asking, Doing, Expressing)
Researchers broke down user intent into three categories:
1. Asking: When users seek information or advice to be better informed or make better decisions.
- Who was president after Lincoln?
- How do I create a budget for this quarter?
- What was the inflation rate last year?
2. Doing: When users ask ChatGPT to do a task for them.
- Rewrite this email to make it more formal.
- Produce a project timeline with milestones and risks in a table.
- Extract companies, people and dates from this text into CSV.
3. Expressing: When users neither ask for information or for ChatGPT to do a task.
- I’m feeling a bit down today, just wanted to chat.
- I’m so excited about my vacation next week.
- I think the new office policy is really unfair.
In 2024, user queries were nearly evenly split between asking and doing. In 2025, that distribution is a bit different:
| User Intent | 2025 Breakdown |
|---|---|
| Asking | 51.6% |
| Doing | 34.6% |
| Expressing | 13.8% |
Related Article: OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent: What It Can Do & How to Use It
2. Who Is Using ChatGPT?
Gender Gap
To figure out the gender breakdown of ChatGPT users, looked at which users had typically masculine first names vs. those with typically feminine first names.
ChatGPT’s early adopters were mostly male — just a few months after the launch, 80% of active users were male.
This gender gap has narrowed dramatically over the past year. As of June 2025, the share of male active users declined to 48%, with female active users rising to 52%.
Age Distribution
Last year, nearly half of all ChatGPT messages were from adults under 26. In recent months, however, that gap has narrowed.
Today, older users are more likely to send work-related ChatGPT messages.
Geographical Adoption
ChatGPT usage has grown faster in low- and middle-income countries.
There was also disproportionate growth in countries with $10,000-$40,000 GDP-per-capita when looking at 2024 vs 2025.
Education and Occupation
Highly paid professionals, especially those in scientific and technical fields, are more likely to use ChatGPT for Asking rather than Doing in work contexts. Training in prompt engineering for better querying and advice-seeking could be crucial for these roles.
Other findings include:
- Those with formal education are more likely to use ChatGPT for work.
- The number of messages users send related to writing increases with education.
Related Article: Trusting AI Agents at Work: What Employees Really Want
3. What Topics Are People Talking About?
The three most common topics people discuss with ChatGPT are:
- Practical Guidance
- Seeking Information
- Writing
These topics alone account for around 77% of all ChatGPT conversations.
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Changes in Topic: 2024 vs 2025
| Topic | 2024 Rate | 2025 Rate | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practical Guidance | 29% | 29% | Tutoring, how-to advice, creative ideation |
| Writing | 36% | 24% | Editing, critiquing, summarizing, translating, writing new text |
| Seeking Information | 14% | 24% | Searches for information on people, current events, products |
| Technical Help | 12% | 5% | Computer programming, math calculation, data analysis |
| Multimedia | 2% | 7% | Image generation, image analysis, generate/retrieve audio |
| Self-Expression, Games & Role Play | N/A | 2.3% | Casual conversations, personal reflections, role-playing scenarios |
| Unknown | N/A | 8.7% | Questions about model capabilities, or user intent unclear |
Ultimately, over the past year, ChatGPT has evolved from rapidly adopted new technology to a tool with diverse applications, especially in non-work contexts. The gaps between who’s using the AI chatbot (men vs. women, younger people vs. older people) are narrowing, and those users are now increasingly asking for both guidance and information.
Related Article: Who’s Using AI at Work? Anthropic Index Breaks Down Global Adoption Trends
5 Key Takeaways For Enterprise Leaders
1. Your Peers Are Already Profiting From AI Assistance
ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and many workers are already leveraging AI. The competitive landscape for AI skills — like data literacy and crafting governance frameworks — is growing.
2. Focus on Asking for Better Reults
The number of users Asking ChatGPT for information and guidance is growing fast. Formulating clear, insightful questions to leverage AI as an advisor or research assistant can lead to more valuable outcomes than simply asking it to do tasks.
3. AI Is Your Go-To for Writing, Editing and Information Gathering
Writing is the most common work-related ChatGPT applications, and two-thirds of those tasks include modifying existing text. AI can be a powerful tool for refining content, reports and documents you’ve already drafted.
Those using ChatGPT to find information has also grown significantly, and it is now a close substitute for a traditional Google search. The AI tool is a valuable one for finding quick information retrieval and synthesis.
4. AI Offers Broad Decision-Making Support Across Many Job Functions
Regardless of your specific occupation, ChatGPT is consistently used at work for:
- Obtaining information
- Documentation
- Interpretation
- Making decisions
- Giving advice
- Solving problems
- Thinking creatively
5. Let AI Do the Teaching
Education, like tutoring and teaching, accounts for a major portion of Practical Guidance messages and all user messages. ChatGPT shows potential as a personal learning and skill-development resource for employees, and can play a major part in learning the skills needed to use AI tools better.
FAQs
Training should focus on real-world scenarios like summarizing meetings, rewriting emails, obtaining information and synthesizing research. Teach employees how to frame good prompts, evaluate AI outputs and integrate AI into existing workflows.
It can be — especially if employees input sensitive data into unsanctioned AI tools. Enterprises should implement secure AI environments, restrict usage of public AI models for confidential information and monitor shadow AI patterns.
ChatGPT usage refers to employees interacting with the tool ad hoc (e.g., asking questions or rewriting text). True integration embeds AI capabilities into internal workflows and decision-making processes using APIs or fine-tuned models.
Track AI performance metrics like time saved on repetitive tasks, improved employee satisfaction, faster project turnaround and reduced reliance on external content creators or researchers. You can also monitor knowledge worker productivity and AI-driven insights.
