Editor's Synopsis
Ronnie Chatterji highlights a dramatic shift in how people interact with AI, comparing findings from two studies. In a 2025 paper titled "How People Use ChatGPT", the research team found that usage was primarily centered around "asking" rather than "doing" — users were treating AI as an information tool rather than a task executor.
In a new 2026 study on Codex, however, the landscape has changed significantly. The share of individual users delegating full workday tasks (8 hours or more) to AI rose nearly 10x from January to May 2026. This represents a fundamental transition from AI as a conversational assistant to AI as an autonomous agent capable of handling substantial, real-world work, signaling a major inflection point in AI adoption and workforce dynamics.