AI use and occupationsFatih Kansoy ↗
Occupation observations April–May 2026Five observation windows Definitions

Research data for comparing published AI activity across places and relating it to the kinds of work people do.

The project connects public Anthropic Economic Index summaries to international and UK occupation classifications and official labour statistics. It preserves published usage totals, measures gaps in the evidence and shows how classification choices affect the results.

The observations describe categories of consumer AI activity. They do not identify users’ jobs.

Global publication pattern

Choose a region to show only its countries. Select or hover over a point to see its name and values.

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How much AI activity is visible?

Published categories cover different amounts of activity in each country. A longer task list can reflect more platform use and more published detail, rather than wider adoption across the economy.

Occupation categories retain more activity

Median published share, May 2026

Occupation categories79.17%
Task categories42.25%

Separate medians across 121 countries and areas. The unpublished remainder is not evidence of no activity.

Country rankings by published task count and usage volume are almost identical: 0.996 rank correlation. Task counts alone are therefore a poor guide to differences in occupational use.

Read the findings and their interpretation

Why connect AI activity to occupations?

Knowing what AI could do is different from observing the activities people bring to it. The Anthropic Economic Index makes some of those activities visible. Connecting them to local occupations and labour statistics makes that evidence more useful for economic research.

But a country label does not make a result locally representative. Job classifications differ, publication is uneven, and an activity label does not identify the person doing it. This project makes those measurement choices inspectable.

Different job classifications
Documented links connect US O*NET categories to European ESCO, international ISCO and UK SOC. Allocation preserves the published total and shows the ambiguity in those links.
Unequal publication across countries
Coverage tables retain what was published, what is missing and the original denominator. An unpublished category is not treated as evidence of no AI use.
Activities, workers and outcomes
Consumer activity stays distinct from employment and pay. Prepared data joins support further research without claiming that activity shares measure worker adoption or economic effects.

From source categories to local occupations.

The method divides each published US-category share among its linked destination occupations. The baseline uses equal splits; stricter links and conditional ranges show how much the choice matters.

Every published share is accounted for

Germany, May 2026. Using all typed links at the ISCO two-digit level:

Published occupation activity97.76%
97.49%Allocated to named occupations
+
0.27%Unmatched, kept explicit

The remaining 2.24% is outside the published total. It stays separate and is not redistributed.

Equal splits are a transparent assumption, not observed flows of workers. The international allocation is available beyond Europe; Europe and the UK provide detailed cases for connecting it to labour statistics.

Read the allocation method
One occupation, two populations

ICT professionals in Germany

Information and communications technology professionals · ISCO 25

Both bars use a 0–15% scale.

Allocated consumer activity · May 2026
10.96%
Share of employment · 2025
2.71%

4.04×Activity share relative to employment share

This group receives a larger allocated share of national consumer activity than its share of employed people (2025 residents aged 15–74). It does not mean its workers are 4.04 times as likely to use AI.

Conditional mapping range: 9.14–13.70% of country activity. This describes alternative splits among permitted links, excludes unpublished activity, and is not a confidence interval.

Explore occupations and countries

What the 35 datasets provide.

Download complete tables, preview their contents and read the field definitions and source notes. Coverage differs across datasets: they do not all describe 121 countries and areas, or the same dates and occupations.

Relate activity to labour-market data

Prepared panels connect activity measures to European employment (2020 onward), UK employment and pay (2021–2025), and UK recruitment adverts (January 2017–July 2026). These are research inputs; no hiring or wage effect is estimated.

Compare months and occupation labels

The April–May comparison applies fixed classification weights to common countries and occupation groups, retaining each month’s publication status. An ESCO reference supplies occupation labels in 28 languages for local review and evaluation. Neither establishes a long-run diffusion trend or multilingual classifier accuracy.

Browse all 35 datasets

Tables retain source dates, units, population definitions and quality flags. Reuse means taking those documented inputs into your own comparisons, mapping checks or empirical study.

What is observed, and where?

The project analyses public aggregate summaries of consumer Claude.ai activity. Anthropic assigns activity and occupation categories to conversations; this project does not access private conversation text.

A request such as help me debug this code describes programming activity. Its author could be a developer, a student or someone working on a personal project. The category does not identify their job or establish workplace use.

The source covers one provider and a selected consumer population. Activity shares are not economy-wide adoption rates, and these data alone do not identify effects on employment, wages or productivity.

The geographic and time coverage

May 2026
121 countries and areas with occupation observations.
April 2026
114 countries and areas with occupation observations.
Earlier task snapshots
Three weekly windows, beginning in August 2025, are documented separately. They are not appended to the monthly occupation series as a continuous trend.
Geographic directory
250 entries retain both observed and unobserved places. Directory membership is not evidence availability.

26 June 2026 source release · Observation timeline · Country directory

The paper behind the data.

Measuring AI Use across Countries and Occupations

The paper develops the motivation and literature, defines the measures, presents the findings and distinguishes what the evidence supports from what remains unresolved. Five appendices document construction, allocation formulas, additional comparisons, exposure reconstruction and reproducibility.