How AI is expanding what people do at work

New research analyzing over 800,000 messages from U.S. ChatGPT users indicates AI is changing work. The study found 16.8% of work-related messages and 43.5% of occupation-specific messages involved tasks associated with another occupation. This suggests AI allows workers to experiment with new activity combinations, offering an early signal of occupational change before job descriptions are rewritten or new titles created, which conventional labor-market statistics would capture later.