Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of the furniture. A decade after IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy!, generative AI models have found their way into kitchens and home offices. People often talk about AI in science fiction terms, but the most significant change in 2025 may be its commonplace adoption.
To understand how common the use of AI has become, it helps to remember that this trend didn’t start with generative chatbots. In our 2017 Knowledge at Wharton newsletter, we documented how deep learning algorithms are already powering chatbots on social media and facial recognition features in photo apps. Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa performed mundane tasks, and AI-powered image generators could create images that fooled 40% of viewers.
When ChatGPT became publicly available on November 30, 2022, the change felt sudden, but it was built on years of gradual integration. AI is now so commonplace that people ask chatbots for recipes, use them as learning partners, and rely on chatbots for administrative tasks. As a writer and professor who studies how generative AI can become everyday collaborators, I’ve noticed that recent usage reports show how AI is being integrated into everyday life. (Full disclosure: I am a member of OpenAI’s Educator Council, an unpaid group of higher education faculty who provide feedback to OpenAI on educational use cases.)
Who is using ChatGPT and why?
OpenAI and Harvard University economists analyzed 1.5 million ChatGPT conversations from November 2022 to July 2025. Their findings indicate that adoption is expanding beyond early users. It is used all over the world and among all kinds of people. Adoption is growing fastest in low- and middle-income countries, with growth rates in the lowest income countries now more than four times faster than in the richest countries.
Most interactions revolve around everyday activities. Three-quarters of the conversations include hands-on instruction, information exploration, and writing. These categories are for activities like getting advice on how to make an unusual type of food, finding the nearest pharmacy, or getting feedback on an email draft. More than 70% of ChatGPT usage is for non-work tasks, illustrating the role of AI in people’s personal lives. Economists found that 73% of messages were not work-related as of June 2025, up from 53% in June 2024.
Claude and the Geography of Adoption
Anthropic’s economic indicators paint a similar picture of uneven AI adoption. The company’s researchers tracked users’ conversations with the company’s Claude AI chatbot compared to the working-age population. The data show striking contrasts between countries. Singapore’s per capita usage is 4.6 times higher than expected based on population size, and Canada’s is 2.9 times higher. Meanwhile, in India and Nigeria, Claude usage is only a quarter of what was expected.
In the United States, utilization reflects local economies and activities are tied to local strengths. In California it’s technology, in Florida it’s finance, and in Washington DC it’s documentation. In countries with low usage, more than half of Claude’s activities involve programming. In countries with high usage rates, people are applying it across education, science, and business. Countries with high usage rates prefer humans to perform repetitive tasks with AI, such as revising text, while countries with low usage rates rely on delegating complete tasks, such as retrieving information.
It’s important to note that OpenAI reports 400 million to 700 million weekly active users in 2025, while third-party analysis estimates Claude’s monthly active users at approximately 30 million over a similar period. For comparison, Gemini has around 350 million monthly active users, and Microsoft reported in July 2025 that the Copilot app had more than 100 million monthly active users. Perplexity’s CEO reported in an interview that the company’s linguistic AI has a “user base of over 30 million active users.”
Although these metrics are for a similar period of mid-2025, it is important to note the differences between the reports and metrics, especially the weekly and monthly active user counts. But no matter how you look at it, ChatGPT has by far the largest user base, making it a commonly used generative AI tool in daily work.
everyday tools
So what is the everyday use of AI in the home? Consider the following scenario.
- Meal planning and recipes: Parents asked ChatGPT for vegan meal ideas that save time and reduce waste using leftover kale and mushrooms.
- Personal finance: ChatGPT creates budgets, suggests savings strategies, details credit card offers, and translates legal jargon into plain language.
- Writing Support: Neurodivergent writers use ChatGPT to organize ideas and structure drafts. Writers with ADHD can upload their notes, have the model group them into themes, and develop each one into a paragraph while maintaining the writer’s tone and reasoning. This reduces cognitive overload, supports concentration, and at the same time allows writers to maintain their own opinions.
These scenarios demonstrate that AI can assist in daily decision-making, act as a sounding board, and support creativity. Assistance with everyday tasks can be a huge improvement. AI handles everyday planning and information searching, freeing people to focus on empathy, judgment, and reflection.
From extraordinary tools to everyday tools
AI will move from futuristic curiosity to everyday co-pilot, with voice assistants and generative models helping people write, cook, and plan.
Inviting AI to your kitchen table, not as a mystical omens, but as a helpful assistant, means learning techniques to cultivate and encourage AI literacy. It means recognizing the strengths of AI, mitigating its risks, and shaping a future where human and artificial intelligence work for everyone.
