ChatGPT’s expanding world of work

OpenAI has released new OpenAI Signals data exploring 165 work activities across nearly 100 countries to show how consumers use ChatGPT for work, covering tasks from preparing instructional materials and developing marketing content to programming and analyzing business data. The data maps ChatGPT usage to 165 Intermediate Work Activities (IWAs) drawn from O*NET, a standardized framework that groups occupation-specific tasks into broader work-activity categories shared across occupations, and is reported quarterly from Q1 2025 through Q3 2026. Researchers can use it to compare usage across countries, track changes over time, and link it to other economic indicators. OpenAI reports that work-related use became less concentrated in the most common activities over time: across 74 countries observed every quarter, the ten most common activities accounted for an average of 51.1% of each country's classified work messages in Q3 2026, down from 56.0% in Q1 2025, suggesting countries increasingly specialize in different types of work. A comparison of ChatGPT usage with the task mix of U.S. jobs shows substantially different distributions, largely because about 43% of the employment-weighted task mix for mapped U.S. occupations falls into "Other IWAs" such as moving materials, operating vehicles, and maintaining health records, which were omitted for not meeting representation thresholds. The release covers work-related messages on individual ChatGPT plans and excludes enterprise messages and Codex use; to protect privacy, researchers do not read individual conversations, automated systems classify messages after identifying information is removed, and OpenAI publishes only aggregated statistics, withholding results for small groups and adding statistical noise.

(Source：OpenAI)