Technology And Analytics

How
GenAI People Are Really Using
by Marc Zao-Sanders
March 19, 2024

Illustration by Travis Constantine

Summary. There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of
areas of domestic and work life. Looking through thousands of comments on sites
such as Reddit and Quora, the author’s team found that the use of this technology
is as wide-ranging as the... more

Ler em português
It’s been a little over a year since ChatGPT brought generative AI
into the mainstream. In that time, we’ve ridden a wave of
excitement about the current utility and future impact of large
language models (LLMs). These tools already have hundreds of
millions of weekly users, analysts are projecting a multi-trillion
dollar contribution to the economy, and there’s now a growing
array of credible competitors to OpenAI.

Yet there’s plenty of trepidation too. Corporate horror stories,

policy restrictions, and hallucinations understandably give
people pause about deploying GenAI, and general technophobia
mean that most people globally have still not tried it. Even
amongst the world’s billion knowledge workers, just 10% use
ChatGPT (which enjoys 60% market share) regularly. Of those
who have, many complain that it’s simply not useful: “Not a single
use case in my life comes to mind when thinking of ChatGPT and
everyone is going insane about it,” bemoaned one user. Others
have been put off that the technology gets things wrong: “It’s so
confidently incorrect about enough things for me to cast doubt on
all of its answers,” said another.

From dozens of conversations with business leaders and chief

learning officers around the world, I’ve gained a strong
impression that what’s missing is convincing, real-world, real-life
use cases. Are people really using these tools? Have they found
ways for generative AI to help them lighten their workloads,
increase their productivity, think through problems in new ways?
The web is replete with surface-level examples such as “text
summarization” or “generating marketing copy” or “code review.”
But these sanitized, generic phrases read like items from a feature
list and do little to entice the uninitiated. The devil — and delight
— is in the details.

To find out more about those details, my company, Filtered

Technologies, mined the web to find concrete examples of it being
used in the wild. We’ve done this before, with Excel tips and
productivity tips. We searched for specific use cases of individuals
deriving benefit from LLMs, in business or life. It turns out the
real treasure is buried deep in popular online forums (Quora,
Reddit, etc.). Reddit, in particular, is a rich source of material for
this study, as well as for the LLMs themselves; 10% of the
company’s revenue is now generated by selling its user-generated
content as training data to LLMs ahead of its mooted IPO.

My team and I filtered through tens of thousands of posts for our

report. The volume was important. The detritus you’d expect from
mostly anonymous online interactions was abundant: inanity,
repetition, jibes, abuse and more. But there were plenty of
diamonds in the rough too. By looking for these authentic, rich
and often hilarious examples, use-case categories were
unearthed, which eventually numbered well over 100. For each
category we kept a tally of how many stories we found, and this
became a major factor (along with some expert assessment) in
ordering the list. We surface a selection of the authentic, positive,
illuminating examples for your convenience and curiosity below.

What We Found
There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast
number of areas of domestic and work life. The use of this
technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in
our lives. We divided the 100 categories we identified into six top-
level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative
AI is being used for:

Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)

Content Creation & Editing (22%)

Personal & Professional Support (17%)

Learning & Education (15%)

Creativity & Recreation (13%)

Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%)

The themes provide an immediate demonstration the

technology’s broad utility. It can be used for work and leisure. It
can be useful for creative as well as technical endeavors. It can be
used to help us think, learn, do, solve, create and enjoy.
We found examples that apply to both individuals and
organizations.

The list is, of course, compiled from examples of reports from

ordinary people who are doing ordinary things better, faster, or
more happily using generative AI. Individuals can look up and
down the list and notice what grabs their attention (or notice that
they’ve found a use beyond what’s listed below). Given the size of
the list, you are very likely to spot some uses to bring to your own
work or home life.

Businesses can use it too. If you’re one of the early corporate

adopters (most likely with the most entrenched supplier,
Microsoft and Copilot), you’ll be wanting to encourage
engagement from your workforce. If your organization is
currently taking a more cautious approach, be aware that many of
your employees are using it anyway. Acknowledging and
harnessing this latent curiosity — in a way that aligns with your
organization’s IT policies — must be better than just simply
outlawing the practice. As Noelle Russell, chief AI officer at the AI
Leadership Institute points out, “In our second year of generative
AI, companies are beginning to ask harder questions that were
previously silenced by enthusiasm, about security, accuracy,
fairness, and performance. The use-cases drive the
understanding, scrutiny, and maturity to achieve enterprise
scale.” If you can play a part in the winning of hearts and minds,
perhaps the list will help you persuade stakeholders and the
powers that be.

What Users Are Doing

Here are some samples from the 100, with one quote for each. The
full list is at the bottom of this article.

Generating ideas (#1). “I love it for brainstorming because

it’s like the perfect teammate. It can keep up with me and
doesn’t get hung up on dead-end ideas, and it can
summarize what we come up with so it’s easier to present or
reference later on.”

Specific search (#2). “There was a particular cookie my

grandmother used to give me and I really liked the taste and
texture, and I had looked at the grocery to no avail until one
evening … I decided that it might be fruitful to ask ChatGPT
for help … It was SnackWell’s.”

Editing text (#4). “I use it to check my own biases with op-

eds and speeches and other political stuff. If something
makes me feel strongly, I copy it into ChatGPT and ask it to
tell me the logical fallacies and possible misinformation in
the piece. It is a HUGE gut check!!”

Drafting emails (#11). “I work in investor relations and the

amount of time I’ve saved using ChatGPT to help me draft
emails is almost unquantifiable.”

Simple explainers (#12). “It’s also way better at explaining

concepts to non-engineers than us engineers are. By default
it writes at a 5th-grade level, which is perfect for a lot of
people we interact with at work.”

Excel formulas (#14). “I have to write a lot of .vb and Excel

formulas to reconcile data from less technical people.
ChatGPT helps 45-minute tasks take about three to five
minutes.”

Making a complaint (#23). “A car wash damaged my wife’s

SUV and refused to pay, so GPT drafted a demand letter for
me, and I took them to small claims court.”

Generating appraisals (#26). “I know some managers who

use it to help punch up performance appraisal write ups for
their employees.”
 Editing legal doc (#44). “I fed it a long, overly complex
service level agreement for a SaaS contract and ask it to
rewrite it to make it simpler and easier to digest. It kept the
important SLA terms but condensed the language by 70%.”

Sampling data (#85). “It’s great for producing demo data.

[If you] need a bunch of fake company names or customer
names or product codes, ChatGPT is good at deriving stuff
like that.”

It’s telling that the most common use case is idea generation. We
naturally think of content (text, images, synthetic data) as the
output to expect from generative AI — it’s virtually built into the
definition. But it seems that out in the real world, people have
developed a wider concept of what the technology is generating,
and it includes ideas. This is not just semantics. Since ideas are
not final outputs, with this use case, generative AI is supporting
existing part-automated, part-manual processes rather than
replacing them with wholesale automation. This is also true for
each of the 15 learning and education use cases in the list. Such
human-plus-machine collaboration feels less threatening to the
trepidatious majority. Indeed, for almost every single use-case in
the list, there’s a human somewhere in the loop to check, approve
and utilize the results AI generates.

Our analysis also shows that expensive professional services are

now accessible to far more people — 13 items on the list are about
the law, coding or medicine. Legal documents can be understood,
edited, and drawn up from scratch without appointing a lawyer or
incurring fees. Code can be written, reviewed, and generated in
seconds. People are bypassing medical experts with generative AI
too. Experts are expensive, inaccessible to many, and typically not
available on-demand, 24/7. And the web is unable to provide
personalized advice and support. So, people are starting to see
generative AI as the best of both: cheap, accessible, always-on,
instantaneous, and personalized. (Of course, we need to exercise
caution here too. These models, while advanced, do not always
fully grasp the nuanced, context-specific knowledge and ethical
considerations at play, and will therefore sometimes offer
oversimplified or incorrect advice and outputs.)

The list has a more-or-less even balance of work and leisure

examples. Indeed, for many use cases we find both an example
from each, such as for language translation (#18), drafting a
formal letter (#31) and fact-checking (#52). Jared Spataro,
Microsoft corporate vice president, AI at Work, agrees that non-
work examples are important at this early stage. “One of the
things we’re learning with our customers is the importance of
offering clear and practical guidance on how to get started with
AI,” he says. This research goes a long way in helping people
understand how to integrate AI into their day-to-day lives so they
can enjoy the many benefits it has to offer.

The list of use cases will evolve. The technology is developing and
so is the ingenuity with which people apply it. Indeed, one of the
main points of this article is to encourage, sensible, safe, tangibly
useful experimentation of generative AI. But I also fancy that a
good number of the list are evergreen because they support
timeless pursuits: learning, communicating, thinking.

•••

Real people are really getting plenty from generative AI. These
examples can help us better understand where it’s actually
creating value in people’s personal and professional lives. With
any popular new technology, there are many fans and many
detractors, like the two skeptics at the beginning of this piece.
Who will have the last laugh though? The gleeful celebration of AI
tripping up is irresistible and will do the social media rounds, for
now. But whereas the appeal of this schadenfreude will fade, the
real stories of AI helping human lives will stay and spread. As one
enthusiast said “People that don’t find it useful, simply haven’t
really understood how to use it.” Another put it more sharply:
“The 5% or whatever who use it effectively are going to smoke the
others.”
 See more HBR charts in Data & Visuals 

Marc Zao-Sanders is CEO and co-founder of

filtered.com, which develops algorithmic
technology to make sense of corporate skills
and learning content. He’s the author of
Timeboxing – The Power of Doing One Thing at a
Time. Find Marc on LinkedIn or at
www.marczaosanders.com.

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