Gracy Chen, associated with Bitget, shares a chart she encountered at an MIT event from an NBER working paper titled Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market. The chart examines how exposed different jobs are to AI disruption across wage levels, highlighting the varying degrees of vulnerability depending on income brackets.

The post points to ongoing academic research into AI's impact on employment, suggesting that the relationship between wage levels and AI exposure is a nuanced and important topic for understanding the future labor market. By sharing this research, Chen draws attention to the intersection of AI advancement and workforce economics.

A new NBER working paper by researchers from OpenAI, Duke University, and Harvard provides the first comprehensive analysis of how people actually use ChatGPT, drawing on data from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025. By that point, ChatGPT had been adopted by roughly 10% of the world's adult population. The study finds that early adopters were disproportionately male, but the gender gap has since narrowed dramatically, and growth rates have been higher in lower-income countries.

Using a privacy-preserving automated classification pipeline on a representative sample of conversations, the researchers find that non-work usage has grown from 53% to over 70% of all conversations, outpacing the steady growth in work-related messages. Work usage skews toward educated users in highly-paid professional occupations. The three dominant conversation topics — "Practical Guidance," "Seeking Information," and "Writing" — collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing is particularly dominant for work tasks, underscoring chatbots' distinctive advantage over traditional search engines in generating digital outputs. Notably, computer programming and self-expression represent relatively small shares of overall use, challenging common assumptions about LLM chatbot adoption patterns.

The paper concludes that ChatGPT's primary economic value lies in decision support, which is especially impactful in knowledge-intensive jobs. The study was conducted with Harvard IRB approval, though several authors are OpenAI employees, a disclosed affiliation.

A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) surveyed approximately 6,000 CEOs, CFOs, and other executives and found that the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. The finding, shared by FORTUNE on X (formerly Twitter) in February 2026, suggests a notable disconnect between the widespread hype surrounding artificial intelligence and the actual perceived effects on day-to-day business operations at the executive level. This raises important questions about the pace of AI adoption and whether the technology is delivering on its promised transformative potential for enterprises.