An independent study of 85,633 conversation turns finds nearly half of AI use is not work

MIT Technology Review reported on 18 August 2026 on an AI Observatory study covering 85,633 conversational turns across 24,521 conversations, drawn from seven datasets spanning about five thousand users and 52 models between 2023 and 2025. Its headline finding cuts against the productivity framing vendors publish: 48% of conversations were on non-work topics. Non-work conversations carried markedly higher rates of health and relationships (44.2% vs 31.2%), adult content (7.9% vs 2.1%), harassment (27.5% vs 5.66%) and sexual content (16.7% vs 2.4%). Usage split by model — Grok and Gemini for retrieval, Anthropic models for coding, Gemini for roleplay, ChatGPT for homework — and conversations lengthened over time with more small talk. The piece is equally clear about the limit: Anthropic’s Economic Index analyses a million conversations and OpenAI’s reports 1.5 million, both on data no outside researcher can touch, so as one researcher puts it, "there is no independent source to corroborate it."

What it means Any adoption number you are planning against almost certainly comes from a vendor measuring its own product; this is the largest independent counter-sample available, and it disagrees on the most basic question of what people use these things for.