How AI is expanding what people do at work

OpenAI's research analyzed over 800,000 work-related messages from ChatGPT users to study how AI is changing what tasks people do at work. The analysis found that nearly half of occupation-specific AI use involves tasks traditionally associated with other jobs, a pattern the researchers call "task crossover," where workers expand beyond their traditional role boundaries. This matters because it suggests AI is reshaping which workers perform which tasks before these changes appear in official job descriptions or titles. The research also found that task crossover is more common in small businesses, that marketing and engineering tasks travel most widely across occupations, and that some occupations like customer experience and design are borrowing significantly more outside tasks than they contribute to other fields.