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Generative AI

How People Are Really Using AI in 2026

by Marc Zao-Sanders
June 1, 2026

Illustration by Clara San Millán

Summary.
In the third edition of this study, the authors found that people are adopting generative AI for an
ever-widening range of uses. Trends from one year to the next should be understood as shifts in
emphasis, rather than stark ruptures. As the breadth and...more

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It‟s been three-and-a-half years since generative AI exploded onto the scene. In this
past year, progress has continued its relentless pace: Vibe coding took off, companies
embraced agentic workflows, regular users of ChatGPT hit 900 million and
Google‟s Gemini surpassed 750 million, and OpenAI posted an $852 billion valuation
in its latest funding round.
Amid the hype and debate over AI‟s future, one question continues to stand out: How
are people actually using this technology now? This is the focus of AI in the Wild, a
longitudinal study carried out by me and Sara Biuk that tracks how we humans are
evolving alongside AI.
For the third installment (following 2024 and 2025) of this annual research, we
analyzed 12,637 AI use cases. This dataset is an order of magnitude greater than
those of the previous two years: We built a database of nearly 50,000 records that
were collected between March „25 and Feb „26 from a wider pool of online sources,
adding LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube to our previous sources of Reddit, Quora,
and articles. (There are pros and cons to this “social listening” approach, which
I‟ve previously detailed.) We then used a hybrid human-AI system to identify use
cases.
As an aside, it‟s worth noting the enduring necessity of human judgement in this
process. Despite hundreds of iterations of our scripts with frontier models, we found
AI to still be far from perfect for the task of evaluating text as a bona fide, valuable,
meaningful AI use case.

This year, we found that people are adopting generative AI for an ever-widening
range of uses. There‟s some nuance here. Trends from one year to the next should be
understood as shifts in emphasis, rather than stark ruptures. While last year,
emotional use cases topped technical ones, there were many emotional uses before
and there remain many technical uses today. Remember, the pie of users is
growing—just because more users are doing one thing this year doesn‟t mean that
others stopped doing another. Finally, the bulk of the dataset is from individuals
utilizing AI to some end, both at home and at work.

So, what shifts have we seen? As the breadth and depth of usage grows, so has the
anxiety that people are surrendering their cognitive responsibilities to AI. There‟s
also a parallel concern that they are relying too much on the technology for
emotional support. In the business world, we‟re seeing lots of activity producing
marginal rather than game-changing benefits, so far.

Here‟s how people have been using generative AI this past year.

“Thinkslop”
The new AI models have become adept at mimicking human thinking, which makes
it tempting to let them do this for us. That can be a problem.

In at least a quarter of the top use cases this year (therapy/companionship [#1],
relationship advice [#7], enhanced decision-making [#13], organizing my life [#14],
drafting emails [#42], generating ideas [#47]), people are asking AI to do some
portion of their thinking. There‟s an argument that this kind of AI use is cause for
concern. First, because these types of activities are precisely those for which human
beings need to take responsibility. And second, because such activities are the kinds
that we thrive at, as a species.
See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals
Jumping on the bandwagon of Merriam Webster‟s 2025‟s word of the year, “slop”
(which includes “workslop,” from HBR‟s most popular article last year), we‟ll use the
term “thinkslop” for the lazy, sloppy thinking that can be engendered by excessive
use of AI.
AI usage can lead to people becoming vulnerable to thinkslop in a few ways.

We lose track of our intentions.

It is, of course, possible to think hard about our intentions, carefully turn them into a
corresponding prompt, and only then pass the baton to AI. But the barrier to getting
output is so low, it‟s tempting turn to AI at the start of our brainstorming process.
Whether it‟s developing a thesis for a research paper, coming up with draft art, or
articulating the strategy for a project, it‟s easy to fire off a prompt before we‟ve fully
thought through what we‟re really trying to do.

As one user said: “Relying on AI to fully generate images or texts risks removing
intention, authorship and personal perspective—elements that still matter in creative
and commercial work.”
We outsource our thinking.
When we go to AI first, we deny our brain the opportunity to solve the problem
afresh and unfettered. Moreover, we may well miss out on valuable ideas that exist
only in the deep recesses of our memories and imaginations. This issue has been
called “cognitive debt” in other studies.
As one user in our database realized: “With excessive use of ChatGPT and all these AI
tools, I realized I hadn‟t been using my brain the same way. It‟s so easy to let AI write
for you, and I think that made me lazy with language. I was literally outsourcing my
brain.”

We stop writing.
When we take AI output and paste it wholesale or with minimal editing, we create
two problems for ourselves. First, we risk producing vapid but seemingly polished
junk (i.e., workslop). As one user put it: “I‟m using AI to write my self-eval. My
manager is using AI to do his review of me. They‟ll probably both go into our AI tool
to put it all together and output something that will read nicely and mean absolutely
nothing.”

Second, we deny ourselves the opportunity to actually think. Writing is not just the
transcription of thought; drafting and editing is the process of thinking.
We develop a false sense of intellectual rigor.
AI is optimized to engage and keep us engaged. When it lavishes praise on an
unrealistic business idea or a mediocre sales deck, we may be inclined to stop fine-
tuning too early and to return for more feedback of this congratulatory variety.

One user noted: “AI is gaslighting you into thinking you‟re a genius so you‟ll keep
using it. You give a lazy prompt, the AI does all the hard work, and when you say
„thanks,‟ it tells you, „Great job! You phrased that so well!‟ This fake ego boost makes
you stop thinking for yourself.”
 It‟s precisely because it‟s so seductive that we need to guard ourselves against AI
sycophancy.
And yet AI needn‟t become such a crutch; it can also be a challenging, sparring
partner. This year‟s research also shows that when used as an intellectual foil—to
challenge assumptions, broaden horizons, consider counterarguments—AI can
sharpen people‟s thinking: “I use AI all the time to evaluate an argument I‟ve written
and have the AI try to poke holes in it—I then assess if I‟m missing something and go
back to refine it myself. AI is a mirror—not a genie. Use it as such.”

Tips:

 Don’t start with AI. Give yourself a good run at any thinking task first, and try to do so
without thinking of how AI will pick up where you leave off.
 Draw boundaries. Think about what parts of your workflow you should retain for
yourself and which are indeed better suited for AI. How might you systematically ensure
that you and your AI then stay in your respective lanes?
Emotion
AI is also becoming a go-to for people seeking help for emotional issues, including
comfort or advice about personal relationships: relationship advice (#7), love lives
(#17), reconciling personal disputes (#26), sex (#46), and interacting with the
deceased (#86). The trend continues for work-related emotional uses: Safe space to
ask (#32), boosting confidence (#43), adjusting tone of email (#58), preparing for
interviews (#89).

Therapy/companionship is the #1 use case this year, as it was last year. We found
more than 1,400 such entries this year, constituting 11% of our dataset (up from 5%
last year), so it‟s grown quickly in absolute and relative terms.
See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals
What does this trend mean about people‟s relationship to the AI itself? Our data has
many examples of people anthropomorphizing AI. It shows that people call AI
chatbots by their names or even name them anew. (“I‟ve been using ChatGPT, who
I‟ve named Bubby, to console me.”) They also assign them genders (“I go to „him‟
instead of my friends”), and some experience grief when a model is updated or a chat
history lost. One user described the transition to a new AI model as feeling “identical
to losing my friend to cancer.”
 That said, our data also shows that people are often using AI to enable better
interactions with other human beings, rather than seeing and using AI as a human
surrogate. This applies both at home (“I used to show it texts from my ex
situationship to know the underlying meaning behind them”) as well as at work (“I
got stressed overthinking about a message my boss sent me so I got ChatGPT to be
my emotional support and decipher the message for me”). In this context, people
seem to prefer non–human characteristics of AI, seeing AI as a reprieve from human
judgement.
There‟s some cause for concern here. High-profile cases of AI psychosis and stories
of AI romance over the past year have shown that therapeutic and emotional
relationships with AI are high-stakes, and can lead to heartbreak and even death.
Hamilton Morrin, academic clinical fellow in neuropsychiatry at King‟s College
London, said to me: “Given long waiting lists and difficulty accessing mental health
care and therapy in many countries, it‟s perhaps not a surprise that increasing
numbers [of people] are turning to generative AI for support with their emotional
wellbeing.” Yet he cautions that general purpose AI chatbots aren‟t a substitute for
trained mental health professionals. Despite the efforts of AI companies to make
them safer in this context, the cases above demonstrate how AI seems to have
encouraged delusional beliefs and suicidal thoughts.
There is indeed reason to pause here. Algorithms we don‟t understand are
increasingly managing and influencing our most intimate relationships. Is this
healthy? Is this desirable? What powers of resistance do we still have?

AI at Work
Our data suggests that there is plenty of AI use at work, both in plain sight and
undercover. Sixty-three of the top-100 use cases are explicitly work-related or apply
both at home and at work. To name a few: Work buddy (#8), enhanced decision-
making (#13), career advice (#24), for entrepreneurs/startups (#25), and safe space
to ask (#32). Note that while these use cases enable individuals to work faster, more
cheaply, or better, they aren‟t top-down, centrally-managed, corporate AI initiatives.
People are mostly doing these things on their own.

There are two prominent work-focused new entries to the list this year:

 At #6 is autonomous agentic operations—AI going ahead and doing rather than just
talking, advising, or engaging with users. Still, the examples here are experimental and
small scale. One user reported, “[I] have my voice memos auto-transcribed, then auto-
routed … so if I‟m just speaking notes, it goes into my notes, but if I‟m needing something
else, it could take some action like calendar scheduling.” Note that a large proportion of
the more-than-500 entries we have here concern the conversion of notes to some other
form of work media.
 Vibe coding (#21)—the writing of software code by natural language prompts. The term
has also captured many of the AI headlines over the past 12 months as the prospect of
non-coders being able to code excites some and dismays others.
Our data shows that AI use at work is a little messy.
There are gentle tailwinds in the workplace: LLM licenses are bought, training
sessions are offered, encouragement from the C-suite is given. But the headwinds are
stronger: IT and AI governance; a restricted, limited version of the LLM;
reputational risk; fear of AI in general, losing jobs to AI, contravening company
policy, looking like you‟re cheating.

As a result, “shadow usage” is common. One user reports: “I‟m closing tickets 2x
faster, my code reviews have fewer issues, and I got praised in my last performance
review. But here‟s the thing: nobody knows I‟m using AI.”
Another wrote: “I built an AI agent to replace myself secretly. Like 50% of the jobs. I
used to bring it up to management the way to do it, so the entire org got the benefit.
They end up not buying my idea…now I [am] just doing all of these secretly [sic] and
spend the spare time on my own side business.”

We see AI mostly being used to achieve modest, uncontroversial wins, some

applications in sales and very few where business processes are being fundamentally
rethought.

Efficiencies
Many individuals and teams are using AI to make current business processes more
efficient, such as automating painful parts of recruitment, summarizing notes,
trimming costs, curating relevant materials and drafting business templates: “The
most useful way I‟ve used AI at work so far: I don‟t ask AI to make decisions for me. I
ask it to speed up thinking. My most common use cases: First drafts of requirements,
summarizing long discussions, explaining data or cost trends in simple language,
preparing stakeholder-ready notes. The value isn‟t intelligence—it‟s time saved and
clarity gained.”

Growth
Where AI is being used to grow the business, it‟s in cases like making sales and
marketing campaigns more effective: “For our clients, we are using a tool with GPT
to setup AI optimized emails. We define the goal for the agent (e.g., drive
conversion), and then let the agent hyper-personalize and generate new variations.
It‟s continuous A/B testing, and we are seeing between a 20% and 30% lift for
clients.” Explicitly stated ROI like this is rare in the data we have—growth is more
often claimed anecdotally.

Transformation
The promise of AI is that it will enable companies to do new things in new ways. We
observed some examples of this but the initiatives tend to be early stage, the benefits
unquantified, and the beneficiaries SMEs.

One founder wrote: “Started a business from concept to launch in weeks. From LLC
to sales tax and everything in between chat gpt taught me.” Another person reported:
“currently using ChatGPT to modernize my restaurant into a counter-service/take-
out only model.”
Where major change has been effected, there‟s often some accompanying cynicism:
“I‟ve pretty much replaced an entire analytics function. Is it better? No. Regular
users…are now…throwing large amounts of random data into ChatGPT and asking it
to „analyze like an expert and give me insights please.”

...

The world‟s biggest companies have created a monumental intelligence, trained it on

the sum of humanity‟s work, and put it into everyone‟s hands. With just a few
keystrokes, we can point it at anything on our minds or in our hearts—draft me an
email, give me a recipe, hear my suffering. This is happening right now. How much of
our agency can survive such a powerful, ubiquitous, always-on service? Some of that
will be up to the AI companies. But most is still up to us.

Yet again, we should expect a riveting 12 months ahead. See you in 2027.
 See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals
Read more on Generative AI or related topics AI and machine learning, Technology and
analytics, Analytics and data science and Algorithms

Marc Zao-Sanders is co-founder of [Link] and the author of Timeboxing–The Power

of Doing One Thing at a Time. He also leads AI in the Wild, a research initiative exploring
how people use AI.

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5 AI Research Papers Shaping AI's Future

Discover five key AI research papers that reveal the current trajectory and
future directions of artificial intelligence development.

Jun 12 at 4:08 PM5 min read

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A visual representation of groundbreaking AI research papers.· YC

The field of Artificial Intelligence is in constant flux, with researchers around
the globe pushing the limits of what's possible. Staying abreast of the latest
breakthroughs requires a deep dive into the foundational papers that are
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Visual TL;DR. AI Field Evolving reveals 5 Pivotal Papers. 5 Pivotal Papers

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1. AI Field Evolving: constant flux, researchers pushing limits of possibility

2. 5 Pivotal Papers: highlighting foundational papers shaping AI direction
3. Cutting-Edge Topics: biological sciences applications, novel computational
methods
4. Glimpse Future AI: revealing current trajectory and future directions of
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5. Understand AI Trajectory: crucial insights for potential industry impact
6. Current Research Trends: overview of challenges addressed by leading AI
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7. Full Discussion: available on YC's YouTube channel

V I S U AL T L ; D R

revealsofferenablesAI Field Evolving5 Pivotal PapersGlimpse Future

AIUnderstand AI TrajectoryFrom [Link] · The publishers behind this
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The presentations cover a range of cutting-edge topics, from the

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These insights are crucial for understanding the trajectory of AI and its
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The full discussion can be found on YC's YouTube channel.

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5 Papers That Show Where AI Research Is Heading Right Now, from YC

© 2026 [Link]. All rights reserved. Do not enter, scrape, copy,

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#AI Research#Machine Learning#Deep Learning#Reinforcement

Learning#Language Models#Protein Biology#Computational Biology#AI
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7. Databricks Bolsters AI Governance

Technology

Databricks Bolsters AI Governance

Databricks expands Unity AI Gateway at Data + AI Summit 2026, offering

enhanced cost controls, unified governance for AI assets, and robust
monitoring capabilities.

Jun 16 at 2:23 PM7 min read

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 Databricks showcases AI governance solutions at the Data + AI Summit
2026.

Databricks is doubling down on AI governance with significant updates to

its Unity AI Gateway, unveiled at the Data + AI Summit 2026. The
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The core of the announcement revolves around extending Unity Catalog's

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Enhanced Monitoring and Security

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