Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations

Abstract

With generative AI emerging as a general-purpose technology, understanding its economic effects is among society's most pressing questions. Earlier work on AI impact largely relied on predictions of AI capabilities or focused narrowly on individual firms. Drawing instead on real-world AI usage, we analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized conversations with Microsoft Bing Copilot to measure AI applicability to occupations. We use an LLM-based pipeline to classify the O*NET work activities assisted or performed by AI in each conversation. We find that the most common and successful AI-assisted work activities involve information work--the creation, processing, and communication of information. At the occupation level, we find widespread AI applicability cutting across sectors, as most occupations have information work components. Our methodology also allows us to predict which occupations are more likely to delegate tasks to AI and which are more likely to use AI to assist existing workflows. Finally, we see an increase in occupation-level AI applicability over our 9-month data period, driven primarily by people using AI for more varied tasks. AI applicability scores and component usage and success metrics are available at https://github.com/microsoft/working-with-ai.