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Ask most people what AI is "for" and you'll get spreadsheets, code, and customer service bots.
Ask 12,637 real AI users what they actually used it for last year, and the answer is stranger. The single most common use of AI in 2026, for the second year running, is therapy and companionship. Not code. Not spreadsheets. Someone to talk to — up from 5% to 11% of everything studied.
That's the headline finding from "AI in the Wild," the third annual study by researchers Marc Zao-Sanders and Sara Biuk, published in Harvard Business Review. Instead of asking people what they say they do, the researchers scraped real, self-reported use cases off Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and news articles between March 2025 and February 2026, then used a hybrid human-AI system to classify all 12,637 of them.
What moved. "Fun and nonsense" jumped from 7th to 3rd. Fan fiction and storytelling debuted at #4. Astrology and tarot reading showed up for the first time ever, at #9. Vibe coding — prompting a working app into existence without knowing how to code — didn't rank at all last year; it's #21 now.
What people are actually doing, named and sourced:
Asking AI for relationship advice before a hard conversation with a partner (#7 worldwide), then having the real conversation differently.
Venting to it like a coworker between meetings — the study's new "work buddy" category, #8.
Setting it loose on a multi-step task, unsupervised — "autonomous agentic operations," a brand-new top-10 entrant at #6.
Roleplaying as a Dungeon Master, an original character, or a daily companion on apps like Character.AI and Replika, purely for fun.
Watching AI-generated "reality shows" with characters who never existed — new at #11, one spot outside the top 10.
Drafting a eulogy, wedding vows, a resignation letter, or a breakup text that never actually gets sent.
Practicing a hard real-life conversation — quitting a job, coming out, asking for a raise — as a private roleplay first.
Building an entire parody AI chatbot staffed by real humans typing the answers by hand: one teenager's joke site, "Your AI Slop Bores Me," pulled more than 25 million unique visitors in about a month.
Getting genuinely competent coding help, which barely made news this year precisely because it stopped being surprising.
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Watch the full conversation on demand.
And the pattern cutting across nearly all of it: at least a quarter of this year's top use cases involve people asking AI to do a slice of their actual thinking — not their typing — for them. Zao-Sanders has a name for it: "thinkslop."
What this means for you. You're already the exception. If you're reading a newsletter about using AI deliberately for work, you're ahead of the single largest use case in the world, which is basically "someone to talk to." The fix for thinkslop isn't a better prompt — it's noticing the moment you're about to skip your own thinking, and doing five minutes of it anyway before you hand the rest to AI.
The technology didn't get more serious this year. Its 12,637 real users just got more honest about what they actually use it for.
The full ranking table, the "Your AI Slop Bores Me" story in full, and a free prompt that audits your own week of AI use against this data — all on the site version.
— AI Super Simplified