OpenAI has released OpenAI Signals data covering 165 work activities across nearly 100 countries, showing how consumers use ChatGPT for work. The activities range from preparing instructional materials and developing marketing content to programming and analyzing business data. Researchers can use the data to study how ChatGPT use for work differs across countries, track changes over time, and match it to other economic indicators.
The release links ChatGPT usage to 165 Intermediate Work Activities (IWAs), which are commonly used categories of tasks across occupations. The data is reported quarterly from the first quarter of 2025 through the third quarter of 2026. It draws on O*NET, a standardized framework that groups occupation-specific tasks into broader work activities, allowing comparison with other occupational and employment data. The data shows wide variation across countries in how people use ChatGPT for work.
Work-related use has also become less concentrated in the most common activities. Across 74 countries observed in every quarter, the ten most common activities represented an average of 51.1% of each country's classified work messages in Q3 2026, down from 56.0% in Q1 2025. Countries have tended to specialize in different types of work over time, which may reflect differences in the kind of work done or in access to AI tools.
Researchers can also compare ChatGPT messages with activities performed across U.S. jobs. About 43% of the employment-weighted task mix for mapped U.S. occupations falls into Other IWAs, which include moving materials, operating vehicles, and maintaining health or medical records. The data covers work-related messages on individual ChatGPT plans and excludes enterprise messages and Codex use. Automated systems classify messages without human review of individual conversations, and results are aggregated and noised to protect privacy.
Source: OpenAI Blog · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing