The growth of GPT usage is staggering. In the 12 months from June ‘24 to June ‘25, messages to ChatGPT have grown from 451million to 2.6 billion per day.
For context, that’s roughly 30,000 messages being sent every second. Another way to think about it: by the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, another 150,000 ChatGPT messages have been sent.
A new OpenAI paper, written in conjunction with the American universities Duke and Harvard, has shown an apparent decline in use of ChatGPT for work purposes, whilst use for personal reasons soars. The headlines show that as of July 2025, more than 70% of ChatGPT consumer queries were unrelated to work. This is a stark contrast to just a year ago, when nearly 50% of all messages were for work purposes.
However, the drop in the proportion of work messages is misleading. Excluded from this data are the messages within enterprise GPTs. Whilst exact figures on the use of the enterprise version of ChatGPT are not clear, OpenAI have recently reported that there are more than 3 million business users (up from 1 million a year ago), and some estimates now place paying business accounts at ~5 million.
Takeaways for Leaders
What looks like a drop in “work-related ChatGPT use” is capturing free consumer activity, and individuals purchasing the entry level subscriptions, not the rapid rise of enterprise GPTs embedded inside companies.
Smart industries are moving first—formalising prompt workflows, securing data access, and building private AI copilots. The danger isn’t under-use; it’s leaders mistaking a blind spot for a slowdown
