OpenAI‘s new report, Work at the Frontier: How AI is Expanding What People Do at Work, analyzes over 800,000 ChatGPT messages from U.S. users to measure how AI shifts tasks between occupations. The core finding is task crossover: work historically tied to one occupation appears in the AI usage of people in another. Among work-related messages, 16.8% involve tasks from a different occupation; when generic tasks are excluded, 43.5% of occupation-specific messages are about tasks outside the user’s own field. Customer experience workers (77%), designers (75%), HR workers (69%), legal workers (56%), and marketers (53%) show the highest shares of outside-occupation use.

Marketing and engineering tasks travel farthest across occupations. Marketing-related tasks account for 8.9% of messages from workers in other fields (the highest outward share), while marketers themselves devote 24.3% of their messages to outside-occupation tasks. Engineering tasks appear in 7.4% of messages from other fields, but engineers borrow less (18.5%). In contrast, designers borrow heavily (35.2%) but their own tasks rarely appear elsewhere (1.7%). Financial calculation and technology troubleshooting are the most common cross-occupation tasks across all groups.

Smaller organizations drive higher crossover: among average users, the outside-occupation share falls from 18.9% in workspaces with 2–5 seats to 16.3% in those with over 100 seats. The report suggests AI acts as a generalist tool where specialist resources are scarce. Usage patterns may serve as an early signal of occupational change before traditional labor statistics capture it.