OpenAI released a report titled "ChatGPT's expanding world of work" on October 26, 2026, along with version 3.0 of its Signals dataset, according to PPC Land and Blockchain.News. The report sorts work related ChatGPT messages into 165 activity categories and covers nearly 100 countries from the first quarter of 2025 through the third quarter of 2026. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab); Blockchain.News (opens in a new tab))
The categories come from the Intermediate Work Activities in ONET, the US government's occupational framework. They describe what people are doing, such as giving advice or recording information, rather than job titles, so the data cannot isolate a single profession. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab); Remio (opens in a new tab))
What Americans use it for
In the US, making decisions and solving problems was the largest work use of ChatGPT in the first quarter of 2026, at 21.6% of work requests, down from 22.8% a year earlier, PPC Land reported. Thinking creatively came second at 15.6%, up from 11.8%, and documenting or recording information was third at 11.8%, up from 10.6%. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab))
The biggest change in the US was a drop in the category OpenAI calls interacting with computers, which fell from 11.7% to 6.7% of work requests. Providing consultation and advice moved the other way, rising from 5.5% to 9.0%. Getting information slipped from 11.6% to 9.9%. OpenAI did not explain the fall in computer related requests, and the data cannot show whether that kind of work moved to Codex, which the dataset does not include. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab))
Germany showed the same direction of change in every comparable category. Advice there rose from 7.1% to 11.7% of work requests, while decision making remained the top activity at 19.4%. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab))
Work use is spreading out
Across the 74 countries with data in every quarter, the ten most common activities in each country made up an average of 51.1% of classified work messages in the third quarter of 2026, compared with 56.0% in the first quarter of 2025, a decline of 4.9 percentage points, according to TokenPost and Blockchain.News. OpenAI presents this as a sign that work use of ChatGPT is spreading across a wider range of tasks. (TokenPost (opens in a new tab); Blockchain.News (opens in a new tab))
PPC Land also compared the mix of US work requests with the mix of activities across the US economy. Planning and decision tasks made up 35.8% of ChatGPT work requests but 9.3% of economy wide activity, while communicating and interacting with others made up 7.0% of requests against 12.8% of the economy. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab))
How the data was collected
The data covers individual ChatGPT plans only and leaves out Enterprise accounts and Codex. The wider Signals dataset classifies one million consumer messages a month, and country figures require at least 1,000 messages per country and quarter, TokenPost reported. Automated systems assign the categories after identifying details are removed, researchers do not read individual conversations, and OpenAI adds statistical noise to protect privacy. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab); TokenPost (opens in a new tab); Remio (opens in a new tab))
The figures are shares of work messages, not volumes, so they do not show whether total use of ChatGPT at work rose or fell. OpenAI released the data under a Creative Commons license. (PPC Land (opens in a new tab))
The shift from computer tasks toward advice and creative work suggests that people increasingly use ChatGPT as a sounding board rather than a technical helper, although the missing Codex and Enterprise data could account for part of that change.
