ChatGPT adoption rises fastest in lower-income countries, study shows

A research team at OpenAI, along with others, released a study that shows that everyday use is now the main driver behind ChatGPT’s growth.

The study examines the primary purpose for which people use ChatGPT. It took into account internal messages from consumer accounts to build the bigger picture.

In a LinkedIn post, OpenAI Chief Economist Aaron Chatterji said the change shows how the tool is settling into many parts of daily life. “We’re still learning how people use AI in the wild, but this trend gives us a glimpse into where the value is and how it’s shifting,” he wrote.

The paper has not been peer reviewed. It was written by OpenAI’s Economic Research team with Harvard economist David Deming and is based on what the authors describe as a large-scale, privacy-preserving study of 1.5 million conversations. The company also shared a blog post that tracks the same themes.

ChatGPT is mostly used for everyday guidance and information

While the system can handle complex office work, the researchers say consumers turn to it mainly to “get everyday tasks done.” About three-quarters of chats are categorised into three groups, including practical guidance, seeking information, and writing. The largest group was practical guidance, things like tutoring or teaching help, step-by-step how-to advice, and brainstorming ideas.

Use patterns diverged between home and office. At work, writing was the leading task, making up 40% of work-related messages on average in June. And people were not always asking the model to draft text from scratch. About two-thirds of all writing messages asked for editing, critique, or translation of existing text.

The authors also sorted messages into “Asking, Doing, and Expressing.”

As of July, about half of all messages were “Asking,” which the team says points to people treating the chatbot as an advisor as much as a doer. For work-related traffic, the split flipped about 56% counted as “Doing,” meaning users were handing off specific tasks such as writing.

As the paper puts it, “Writing is a task that is common to nearly all white-collar jobs, and good written communication skills are among the top ‘soft’ skills demanded by employers.”

Workplace impact still under debate

Debate over the workplace impact has followed ChatGPT since its consumer launch in November 2022. In particular, people have been concerned about the loss of jobs. Furthermore, researchers say that evidence mostly revolves around other effects in companies in the short term. ChatGPT is generally used in workplaces to improve productivity rather than replacing whole jobs, especially in knowledge-heavy roles.

ChatGPT’s user base has increased significantly as of July 2025. Approximately 10% of the world’s adults now use ChatGPT in some way. Also, the balance in the audience has increased. In January 2024, 37% of users had names that could be read as typically feminine. The gap between men and women had largely closed by mid-2025.

Growth has been especially strong in markets with income in the lower-middle range. By May 2025, adoption rates in the lowest-income countries were more than four times the rates seen in the highest-income countries. The company continues to offer several ways to use the technology, including paid consumer tiers, an enterprise product, API access, and a software engineering agent called Codex.

That expansion comes as competition heats up. Rivals include xAI, led by Elon Musk, and Google’s Gemini. Just this week, Gemini moved to the top spot among free apps on Apple’s App Store, overtaking ChatGPT, after the August debut of its “Nano Banana” image editor model.

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