A review of 800,000 work‑related messages that U.S. employees sent to ChatGPT shows that more than four out of every ten questions related to their own role were actually about “someone else’s work.”
According to OpenAI’s July‑end report “Work at the Frontier,” after excluding universally‑performed tasks such as writing, summarizing, and calendar management, 43.5 % of the remaining messages involved work that originally belonged to a different function. The share was 77 % for customer‑experience staff, 75 % for designers, and 69 % for HR professionals. Marketers were fixing website bugs themselves, sales reps were handling customer data that analysts would normally process, and HR staff were performing financial calculations. OpenAI calls this phenomenon “task crossover.”
A follow‑up study released in September is even more striking. Tracking roughly 6,200 individuals from April through July, the share of AI usage for tasks that participants had tried once on behalf of another function rose from 13.1 % to 25.9 %—almost a doubling. This indicates that these activities have moved from one‑off curiosity experiments to routine work. Consulting with customers about products was repeated the following month by 54 % of participants, and drafting ad copy by 44 %.
Seeing these numbers, a more practical question came to mind than the familiar “Is AI stealing jobs?”
If you want to assess where work is moving within your organization and redesign your R&R and review processes for the AI era, please reach out to Knowverse’s AI Adoption & Utilization Strategy Consulting. We’ll explore it together using a hands‑on assessment framework.