ChatGPT adoption is accelerating at a scale rarely seen in technology.
By mid-2025, around 700 million people worldwide were using it every week, sending 18 billion messages, which is roughly 10% of the global adult population. For a new technology, this speed of adoption has no precedent.
Yet if you look at your analytics dashboards, you will not see a corresponding surge in referral traffic from ChatGPT. That is because adoption does not always translate into clicks or visits. In today’s AI-driven environment, adoption itself is value. It changes how people learn, shop, and make decisions, often long before they interact with your brand through search, social, or direct channels.
A new study from OpenAI and Harvard sheds light on how people are actually using ChatGPT. The findings identify shifts in consumer behavior, productivity patterns, and global reach. All of these carry implications for CMOs, CEOs, and CFOs.
Work Vs. Non-Work Usage
By mid-2024, ChatGPT was being used almost equally for work and non-work purposes. A year later, non-work usage had surged to nearly three-quarters of all activity, with work-related conversations accounting for around a quarter. This was not only the result of new users joining for personal use, but also due to the increasing popularity of the platform. The data shows that existing users themselves were evolving their habits, leaning more heavily on ChatGPT in their personal lives.
For a CMO, this signals that consumers are weaving AI into their daily routines in ways that reshape how they discover products and services. For a CEO, it underscores that ChatGPT is not confined to the office and is becoming a mass-market behavior that seamlessly integrates into everyday life. For a CFO, the message is that non-work adoption has significant economic value, with researchers estimating consumer welfare gains of $97 billion annually in the United States alone.
Core Use Cases: Guidance, Information, And Writing
The vast majority of ChatGPT usage falls into three categories:
- Practical guidance.
- Information seeking.
- Writing.
Practical guidance includes tutoring, teaching, how-to advice, and creative ideation. Information seeking often looks like a direct substitute for web search, as people ask ChatGPT about current events, products, or factual queries. Writing encompasses the production and improvement of emails, documents, summaries, and translations.
At work, writing dominates. Four in 10 work-related messages concern writing tasks, and most of these are not new generation but rather editing or improving text that users bring to the model. Education is also a notable use case, with roughly 1 in 10 messages asking for tutoring or teaching support.
This matters to the CMO because it indicates that brand discovery is increasingly occurring through AI chat, rather than traditional search result pages.
It matters to the CEO because it demonstrates that AI is becoming a decision-support and creativity tool, not just a way to automate repetitive tasks. And it matters to the CFO because writing and editing at scale represent measurable efficiency gains, translating into more output per worker.
Lesser Use Cases: Coding And Companionship
Some use cases that have attracted outsized attention turn out to be smaller in reality. Only 4.2% of ChatGPT conversations are about programming, a far lower share than rival tools like Claude, which report one-third of their work-related conversations tied to coding. Companionship and emotional support are even less common, accounting for under 2% of ChatGPT usage.
For a CMO, this highlights that ChatGPT is primarily a tool for mass consumer behavior, rather than a niche coder’s tool or a therapy companion.
For a CEO, it confirms that ChatGPT’s role in the market is broad and mainstream.
For a CFO, it suggests that monetization does not hinge on high-value enterprise niches but is instead driven by widespread consumer engagement.
Who Uses ChatGPT: Demographic Shifts
The study also tracks striking demographic changes. In its early months, ChatGPT’s user base skewed heavily male, with around 80% of active users having traditionally masculine names.
By mid-2025, that imbalance had disappeared, with usage now at parity and even slightly higher among women. Age is another clear factor: Nearly half of all adult messages come from users under 26, though older users tend to use ChatGPT more for work-related purposes. Growth is fastest in low- and middle-income countries, indicating that adoption is spreading well beyond the wealthy, early-adopter markets. Among professions, highly educated workers lean on ChatGPT more at work, often using it as an advisor or research assistant.
These findings should capture the CMO’s attention because they indicate a widening and diversifying audience, with younger generations incorporating ChatGPT into their habits in ways that could last a lifetime.
The CEO will see opportunities in emerging markets and among new consumer segments as global adoption accelerates. The CFO can take confidence in the fact that adoption is broad-based across demographics, reinforcing the case for long-term subscription models and monetization strategies.
Interaction Styles: Asking Vs. Doing
When people interact with ChatGPT, about half the time, they are seeking advice, guidance, or information. Around 4 in 10 conversations involve asking ChatGPT to complete a specific task that can be slotted into a workflow. The remainder are less clearly defined.
Asking has grown faster than doing, suggesting that users increasingly see ChatGPT as a partner in thought rather than simply a tool for execution.
For the CMO, this means consumers are engaging in dialogue with AI at the very moment of intent, making it vital to anticipate how brand messages surface in those exchanges. For the CEO, it highlights a shift in how knowledge work is done, with AI shaping decision-making as much as task performance. For the CFO, the implication is that the value of ChatGPT lies not just in time saved but in the quality of decisions it helps users make, which is a less tangible but no less significant form of productivity.
Why This All Matters For The C-Suite
The rise of ChatGPT is not just about referral traffic or attribution models. It represents a new layer of consumer and worker behavior that is already reshaping how decisions are made, how information is accessed, and how productivity is achieved.
For marketing leaders, this means rethinking brand visibility in AI-mediated discovery.
For CEOs, it means recognizing ChatGPT adoption as a mainstream societal shift, not a side experiment.
For CFOs, this means expanding the measurement of value beyond clicks and conversions to include consumer surplus, efficiency, and global market potential.
In short, we now operate in an AI-first world where adoption itself is the signal, not the click.
Editor’s Note: Any data mentioned above was taken from the OpenAI study unless otherwise indicated.
More Resources:
- The CMO & SEO: Staying Ahead Of The Multi-AI Search Platform Shift (Part 1)
- To Navigate AI Turbulence, CMOs Can Apply The Flywheel Model
- The State Of AI In Marketing
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