200,000 Real ChatGPT Chats Show Most People Aren't Using It for Work

Most of what we know about how people use ChatGPT comes from OpenAI and Anthropic's own reports. Those reports sort hundreds of millions of users into fixed categories and publish only summary numbers, which outside researchers can't check or re-analyze. This study did the opposite. It collected complete ChatGPT chat histories — 202,590 conversations from 1,252 users — in India, Nigeria, Brazil and Pakistan, along with each person's self-reported age and gender, covering December 2022 through February 2026.

The headline finding: ChatGPT is mostly a personal-life tool, not an office one. Personal use made up 55% to 64% of conversations in every country, and schoolwork showed up about as often as work tasks. That means the popular story of AI as a workplace productivity booster describes a minority of what people actually do with it.

The study also found each country bending the same product to its own needs. Health and wellness questions were common in India and Brazil. In Pakistan, people leaned on it for Urdu-English translation and religious questions. In Nigeria, current affairs and religion stood out. In Brazil, conversations about self-reflection were unusually common. Big company reports tend to fold all of this into generic buckets like "information seeking," hiding what's really going on.

How usage changed over three years is telling too. Asking for information declined only slightly. Asking the AI to complete a task for you — the kind of thing that worries people about automation — did not grow. What grew was expression: conversations where people talk through feelings, ideas, or personal situations, rising from a few percent to roughly a fifth or more in every country.

The catch: 1,252 people in four countries is a small, self-selected slice, so it can't speak for everyone. And the data came from users who handed over their entire chat histories — a reminder of how much personal material we type into these tools.