Work at the Frontier

Work at the Frontier is a report series from OpenAI Economic Research whose first instalment, «How AI is Expanding What People Do at Work», appeared on 27 July 2026 and draws on more than 800,000 messages from American ChatGPT users. It is built on the «AI Jobs Transition Framework», and OpenAI Economic Research puts a single measurement at its centre: task crossover, work historically associated with one occupation showing up in the AI use of people in another.

Two numbers describe the same phenomenon. 16.8% of work-related messages concern a task belonging to another occupation; among occupation-specific messages the share is 43.5%. The gap is a funnel: 61.5% of professional use is generic (writing, summarising, planning) and set aside before the ratio is computed.

The per-function split is the sharpest part. Customer experience 77%, design 75%, HR 69%, legal 56%, marketing 53%, sales and finance 40%, engineering 28%. Flows run in opposite directions: design imports 35.2% of outside tasks and exports 1.7%, engineering does the reverse at 18.5% and 7.4%, marketing does both (24.3% in, 8.9% out, the largest outgoing share in the sample). On the heatmap diagonal, engineering retains 53% of its own work while customer experience retains 11% and HR 10%.

The size effect is thinner than it looks: the out-of-occupation share falls from 18.9% to 16.3% with workspace size among average users only. OpenAI Economic Research claims the status of a leading indicator, readable before firms rewrite job descriptions. The data measures OpenAI's own product, on American users alone.