AI Uses

Uses of AI – Harvard Business Review March 2024

An article in Harvard Business Review March 2024 is one of the better pieces I’ve seen on how AI is actually being used. In How People Are Really Using AI, the authors took the approach of analyzing tens of thousands of comments on Reddit. Any reader of Reddit knows there’s all kinds of useless and nasty comments, but there are also a lot of useful and genuine comments, which the authors were careful to extract. They organized the comments into six categories (frequencies in parentheses)

  • Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)
  • Content Creation & Editing (22%)
  • Personal & Professional Support (17%)
  • Learning & Education (15%)
  • Creativity & Recreation (13%)
  • Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%)

Going a step further , they identified 100 specific types of tasks that people were trying accomplish. Here are a few of the hundred that they highlighted.

  • Generating ideas (#1)
  • Specific search (#3)
  • Editing text (#4)
  • Drafting emails (#11)
  • Simple explainers (#12)
  • Excel formulas (#14)
  • Making a complaint (#23)
  • Generating appraisals (#26)
  • Editing legal doc (#44)
  • Sampling data (#85)

The article included a graphic that shows the six high level categories and where the hundred tasks fit in. (click for full view)

We have extracted this list into a spreadsheet which you can obtain by contacting us here and requesting it.