Marc Zao-Sanders has authored a number of articles for Harvard Business Review. While published in March of 2024, this provides an interesting snapshot of how people are using GenAI as of Q2, 2024. I hope we can revisit these metrics in a few quarters to see how they’ve changed.
There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of areas of domestic and work life. Looking through thousands of comments on sites such as Reddit and Quora, the author’s team found that the use of this technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in our lives. The 100 categories they identified can be divided into six top-level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative AI is being used for:
- Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)
- Content Creation & Editing (22%)
- Personal & Professional Support (17%)
- Learning & Education (15%)
- Creativity & Recreation (13%)
- Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%).
What’s notable in the context of travel is the lack of evidence that people use GenAI directly for trip planning or traveling. The only item mentioned in the author’s research was ‘Packing for Travel’. By no means is this conclusive evidence, but this may be a signal for the travel industry that user behavior hasn’t changed dramatically since GenAI really took off.
