What 700 Million People Taught Us About ChatGPT

ChatGPT now has 700 million weekly users.

That's 10% of every adult on Earth.

Sending 2.5 billion messages a day.

So what are all those people doing with it?

That's what researchers at OpenAI, Harvard, and the National Bureau of Economic Research set out to answer. Their paper, "How People Use ChatGPT" (NBER Working Paper 34255, September 2025), is one of the more useful things I've read this year.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w34255.pdf

At Ingenia, this study confirmed a lot of what we've been seeing with our clients. Here's what stood out.

First: This Is Bigger Than Work

The default assumption is that ChatGPT is a productivity tool. Something for work. But the data flips that on its head.

In mid-2024, 47% of messages were work-related. By mid-2025, that dropped to 27%.

So what's filling the other 73%? Life, mostly. Curiosity. Creativity. Trip planning. Fitness goals. Birthday poems. Relationship advice. Cooking. Emotional processing. People are bringing it into corners of their lives that have nothing to do with a job.

It's stopped being a tool and started being something closer to a thinking companion.

What People Use It For

Three categories cover about 80% of all usage:

Use Case by % of Messages

Practical Guidance → 29%

Writing → 24%

Seeking Information → 24%

What's wild is that Writing sat at 36% a year ago. It's dropped 12 points. And Seeking Information has nearly doubled in the same window.

That shift matters. People aren't just asking ChatGPT to produce things anymore. They're using it to understand, reflect, and make decisions.

The #1 Work Use Case: Writing

This one surprised me:

• 42% of work messages are writing tasks

• But 67% of those involve editing, improving, or translating content the user already wrote

People want ChatGPT to sharpen their writing, not replace it.

If you're running a business, that's the easiest win sitting right in front of you. Get your team using AI to tighten their own drafts and you'll see better output without adding headcount.

Ask vs. Do vs. Express: The New Framework

The researchers grouped usage into three modes. It's a clean way to think about this:

Intent | % of Messages | What It Means

Asking → 49% → Looking for guidance, advice, clarity

Doing → 40% → Producing something: emails, plans, code

Expressing → 11% → Sharing thoughts, venting, reflecting

At work, Doing dominates at 56%. But Asking is growing fast, and those are the messages users consistently rate as most valuable.

AI helps you get things done faster. But the bigger win is that it helps you think more clearly.

So… Who's Using ChatGPT?

Everyone. But a few patterns worth knowing:

• Gender parity is here: Women now slightly outnumber men among active users

• Young people dominate: 46% of usage comes from users under 26

• Growth is fastest in low- and middle-income countries

• Higher education levels correlate with more work-related usage

• Business professionals lean on it mostly for writing; engineers use it for technical problems

• Across the board, ideation and getting clarity are universal

Here's the Chart You Need to See

The trend is clear: people are learning to ask sharper questions and create smarter output.

Here's what I take from all of this:

1. Prompting is the new Excel.

   If your team can't use AI to think, write, and plan, they're already behind. This is a learnable skill. Treat it like one.

2. The real value today isn't automation, it's amplification.

   ChatGPT makes sharp people sharper. It's a multiplier for creative and strategic work, not a replacement for it.

3. Build with AI in mind, always.

   Your content, your UX, your product strategy: assume your customer is already using AI before they ever reach you.

4. Train your people.

   You probably don't need another AI tool. You need an AI mindset wired into how your whole team works.

5. Writing is still your biggest edge.

   Storytelling, positioning, clarity. These are the skills AI happens to supercharge, which means they matter more now, not less.

ChatGPT's growth is genuinely staggering. But the number doesn't tell the interesting story. The interesting story is what people are doing with it: getting smarter, thinking harder, writing better. The businesses that learn to do the same thing, as a team, with real discipline around prompting, are going to have an edge that compounds over time.