OpenAI plans to measure productivity gains for ChatGPT over the 12 months via the company's economic research team and academic partners.

The research from OpenAI is worth noting. Anthropic has a similar group and recently outlined its use popular use cases and economic impact.

Technology vendors have historically produced research to argue that they boost productivity. Whether it's AI PCs, productivity software or enterprise systems, these research efforts all have some element of marketing involved.

That said, OpenAI has scale--more than 2.5 billion messages per day globally--and insights into use cases. There's also something to be said for collecting data since AI is going to cost jobs over time.

OpenAI's first research volley on economic productivity has a bevy of use cases and stats worth pondering. Here are a few data points:

  • Learning and upskilling is the most popular use case with 20% of usage.
  • 18% of ChatGPT use cases revolve around writing and communication.
  • 7% of ChatGPT usages is programming, data science and math.
  • Design & creative ideation is 5%.
  • 24% of US ChatGPT users are between the ages of 18 and 24 with 32% between 25 and 34.
  • Among OpenAI's enterprise customers 20% are in finance and insurance, followed by 9% in manufacturing and 6% in education services.
  • OpenAI's o1 model increased lawyers' productivity between 34% to 140% across six workflows.

The upshot to OpenAI's first missive is that time savings across multiple industries is valuable. Most of the value today is eliminating the need to hire another human.

Although the data is worth noting, AI usage will need to be tied to more business metrics and economic impact. The big looming question is this: Will AI's benefits be outweighed by likely job losses and downstream effects?

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Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Future of Work

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

Artificial Intelligence (AI), OpenAI