Hundreds of millions of people are now regularly interacting with systems that can write, analyze, advise, code, and increasingly act on their behalf. Never before have so many people had immediate access to such a powerful intellectual tool. But as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, a more fundamental question is emerging: What are we asking AI to do for us — and how much of our thinking and agency are we willing to delegate to it?
“It’s been three-and-a-half years since generative AI exploded onto the scene,” wrote Marc Zao-Sanders in “How People Are Really Using AI in 2026,” a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. published in June, 2026. “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.”
These numbers tell us a great deal about the extraordinary growth of AI. But they don’t tell us what may be the more important story: what hundreds of millions of people are actually doing with these increasingly powerful systems, and how AI might be changing the way we think, work, and interact with each other.
“Amid the hype and debate over AI’s future, one question continues to stand out: How are people actually using this technology now?” added Zao-Sanders. “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.”
AI in the Wild was co-founded by Zao-Sanders and Biuk as a source of information for conducting research on how people are actually using AI. “There is a huge interest in unsanitized, pragmatic information during this critical period for AI and humanity,” they wrote on the AI in the Wild website. Their database includes tens of thousands of use cases showing how people around the world are using AI, with findings delivered through reports, webinars, and ongoing insights throughout the year.
The 2026 article is the third version of their annual research, following similar HBR articles in 2024 and 2025. For the 2026 study, Zao-Sanders and Biuk analyzed more than 12,600 AI use cases.
“This dataset is an order of magnitude greater than those of the previous two years,” they added. “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.”
The use cases were analyzed using a hybrid human-AI system. As an aside, the researchers noted the continuing importance of human judgment in the 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.”
Overall, they found that the number of generative AI users continues to grow and that people are adopting the technology for an increasingly broad range of uses. But this rapid adoption is raising some important concerns.
“As the breadth and depth of usage grows, so has the anxiety that people are surrendering their cognitive responsibilities to AI,” they wrote. “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.”
How have people been using generative AI this past year? Let me summarize some of the key findings from their 2026 study.
AI and Thinking
“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,” the article notes. “In at least a quarter of the top use cases this year people are asking AI to do some portion of their thinking.”
This growing reliance on AI is a 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.”
Excessive reliance on AI can lead to so-called thinkslop — “the lazy, sloppy thinking that can be engendered by excessive use of AI.” They identify several ways this can happen.
We lose track of our intentions. Ideally, we should think hard about what we are trying to accomplish and then ask AI for advice with a carefully prepared prompt. But the barrier to using AI is now so low that it’s tempting to turn to it “before we’ve fully thought through what we’re really trying to do.”
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.”
We stop writing. Let me illustrate this point with a personal example.
I’ve been writing a weekly blog since 2005 as a way to explore new ideas and keep up with advances in technology. Writing and editing each post takes many hours — not only drafting and revising, but researching the subject, thinking through the issues, and framing the argument.
A few months ago, I logged on to ChatGPT and asked the chatbot to help me lightly edit my blogs. Within seconds, it returned an edited draft, explicitly stating that it had focused on clarity, consistency, and grammar without changing my analytical arc or voice.
I accepted many of the edits, rejected others, and in the process remained fully responsible for the ideas, arguments, and final judgment. Most importantly, I had already done the hard work of researching the subject, thinking through the argument, and writing the initial draft before asking AI for assistance in final editing of the blog.
Had I simply asked ChatGPT to write a 1,500-word blog about the subject, I would undoubtedly have saved myself many hours. But I would also have deprived myself of the very reason I started blogging in the first place: to explore new ideas and think more deeply about subjects I find interesting. “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. … It’s precisely because it’s so seductive that we need to guard ourselves against AI sycophancy.”
Rather than using AI as a crutch, the authors argue that we should use it as a challenging sparring partner that helps us sharpen our thinking. They offer two tips for doing so.
- Don’t start with AI. Give yourself a serious opportunity to tackle any thinking task first, preferably without planning how AI will pick up where you leave off.
- Draw boundaries. Decide which parts of your workflow you should retain for yourself and which are better suited for AI. Then develop ways to ensure that you and the AI stay in your respective lanes.
The key question is not whether to use AI. Increasingly, most of us will. The more important question is how much of our thinking and judgment we are willing to delegate to it.
Emotional Uses of AI
Therapy and companionship was the top AI use case in 2026, as it was in 2025. More than 1,400 entries, constituting 11% of the AI in the Wild dataset, involved therapy or companionship, up from 5% the previous year.
AI has become “a go-to for people seeking help for emotional issues, including comfort or advice about personal relationships.” Other highly ranked use cases include relationship advice, love lives, reconciling personal disputes, sex, and even interacting with the deceased.
AI is also being used for work-related emotional situations, such as adjusting the tone of an email and preparing for job interviews.
“What does this trend mean about people’s relationship to the AI itself?” the researchers ask. The data includes many examples of people anthropomorphizing AI — giving chatbots human names or assigning them genders. But the research also suggests that people frequently use AI to help improve their interactions with other humans rather than as a substitute for human relationships.
“In this context, people seem to prefer non-human characteristics of AI, seeing AI as a reprieve from human judgement.”
I found this observation particularly interesting. People may be turning to AI not because they believe it is human, but precisely because they know it isn’t. AI can provide a space where people feel comfortable asking questions or exploring concerns without worrying about embarrassment, social consequences, or being judged.
At the same time, the rapid growth of emotional AI use raises the same question of agency that arises with thinking. When does AI help us better understand our feelings and relationships, and when does reliance on it begin to substitute for the difficult human interactions that are themselves an essential part of life?
AI at Work
There is also plenty of AI use at work. Sixty-three of the top 100 use cases are explicitly work-related or apply both at home and at work. These include interacting with work colleagues, enhanced decision-making, career advice, advice for entrepreneurs and startups, and providing a safe space to ask questions.
But the researchers make a particularly important observation about these workplace use cases: “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.”
In other words, much of AI adoption at work appears to be happening from the bottom up. Employees and teams are experimenting with AI, identifying useful applications, and incorporating them into their everyday workflows, often without waiting for formal corporate programs.
Two prominent new AI-at-work use cases appeared this year: agentic operations — AI doing rather than just talking — and vibe coding, — writing software using natural-language prompts.
“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. Where AI is being used to grow the business, the applications include making sales and marketing campaigns more effective.”
“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,” said the 2026 HBR article, in conclusion. “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.”
AI is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful intellectual tools ever created. But, will it change the way we think, work, and interact with each other? In the end, as has been the case with all powerful tools, its impact will largely depend on how we choose to use it.