# ChatGPT’s expanding world of work

Date: 26 Oct 2026
Released by: OpenAI

## MediaRelease.co Summary

OpenAI Economic Research has released OpenAI Signals data on how consumers use ChatGPT for work, covering 165 work activity categories across nearly 100 countries. The categories are O*NET Intermediate Work Activities, letting researchers compare ChatGPT use across countries, over time and with other economic indicators. The data excludes enterprise messages and Codex use, and is published as aggregated statistics with privacy protections.

## Original release

OpenAI Economic Research releases data for researchers to explore questions on AI and labor more deeply. Explore and download the data Today, we are releasing OpenAI Signals data that explores 165 work activities across nearly 100 countries, revealing how consumers use ChatGPT for work. This data gives researchers a new way to study AI’s role in the economy, with new information on the work activities people bring to ChatGPT—from preparing instructional materials and developing marketing content to programming and analyzing business data. Researchers can use this data to explore how ChatGPT use for work differs across countries, track changes over time, and match this data to other economic indicators. The release connects ChatGPT usage to 165 work activity categories called Intermediate Work Activities (IWAs). IWAs are commonly-used categories of tasks for the kinds of work people do across occupations. The data is represented quarterly, spanning a period from the first quarter of 2025 through the third quarter of 2026. Understanding how people use AI for work at a deeper level Our new data draws on O*NET, a standardized framework that groups occupation-specific tasks into broader categories of work activities shared across occupations. Using a common framework helps researchers compare ChatGPT use with other types of occupational and employment data. The interactive chart below can be used to explore these work activities within a specific country over time, moving from broad activity groups to more specific activities. The data shows wide variation across countries in how people use ChatGPT for work. Connecting this data to IWAs revealed that work-related use became less concentrated in the most common activities. That means that countries tended to specialize in their work over time, and different countries specialized in different types of work. These differences might reflect variation in the kind of work done across countries or varying access to AI tools. Exploring these questions is one example of many that researchers can pursue with this new data. How researchers can use this data Connecting ChatGPT usage data with IWAs lets researchers compare ChatGPT messages with activities performed across U.S. jobs. The paired visualizations below compare how people use ChatGPT with the activities performed across U.S. jobs. This comparison shows the difference in how people use ChatGPT for work and the actual work being done in the U.S. economy. The two distributions differ substantially, largely because about 43% of the employment-weighted task mix for mapped U.S. occupations falls into Other IWAs, outside the individually reported categories. These include activities such as moving materials, operating vehicles, and maintaining health or medical records. These omitted categories did not meet our threshold for consistent representation in the original U.S. ChatGPT sample. Explore the data This release builds on OpenAI Signals, our ongoing effort to share evidence about how people use AI. The data covers work-related messages on individual ChatGPT plans and does not include enterprise messages or Codex use. We invite researchers to explore the data, connect it with other sources, and investigate what these patterns mean for workers and businesses. To protect users’ privacy, researchers do not read individual conversations. Automated systems classify messages after identifying information is removed. We publish aggregated statistics, withhold results for small groups, and add statistical noise to protect individual messages. Source: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-expanding-world-of-work/

## Key details

- Issued by: OpenAI
- Published: 26 Oct 2026
- Publisher country: United States
- Subject country/region: United States
- Topics: AI

Original source: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-expanding-world-of-work/
MediaRelease.co canonical URL: https://mediarelease.co/us/mr02318-openai-signals-data-chatgpt-165-work-activities-100-countries-26102026.html