MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is no longer just answering questions, it is leaving behind a trail of clues about how the world works. Seeking to decode that shift, Google has launched the first edition of AI & Economy ATLAS, a long-term research initiative that tracks how AI is being used across workplaces and everyday life.
The inaugural ATLAS v1.0 dataset draws on 15 million aggregated and de-identified interactions across the Gemini app, AI Mode and the Gemini API, platforms that collectively serve more than one billion users every month.
According to Google, the study spans more than 150 countries, 140 languages, 800 occupations and around 4,000 tasks, offering one of the broadest snapshots yet of AI adoption across regions, industries and professions. The company said the initiative is designed to provide evidence-based insights into AI’s growing influence on work and the wider economy.
The findings suggest that AI is becoming more of a workplace collaborator than a replacement for human workers. Google said AI is now used across every industry sector and in 68 per cent of occupations, representing 90 per cent of total US employment. Even so, users typically rely on AI for only around 21 per cent of the tasks within a job.
Rather than fully automating work, AI is most commonly used for brainstorming, strategy, information gathering and learning, while fewer than 10 per cent of workplace interactions involve complete task automation. The report found particularly strong AI usage in activities such as creative design and hypothesis testing, where adoption outpaced those tasks’ overall share in the economy.
The study also challenges the perception that AI is primarily an office tool. Workers in manual and technical occupations, including automotive technicians and industrial mechanics, are increasingly using AI for diagnostics, troubleshooting and on-the-job learning. Google added that users in these professions are twice as likely to use multimodal AI systems capable of interpreting images and videos.
Beyond the workplace, AI is becoming an everyday digital assistant. According to the report, more than 86 per cent of recorded AI interactions take place outside work, with people using the technology to research purchases, understand household appliances and complete administrative tasks such as taxes, licences and fines.
The research also found that AI adoption broadly mirrors a country’s income levels on a per-person basis, although several middle-income countries in South America and the Middle East are matching AI usage rates seen in wealthier economies. While English accounts for roughly one-third of AI conversations worldwide, users continue to perform increasingly sophisticated tasks in their native languages.
Google said the findings were generated using Google DeepMind’s Observation Clustering and Taxonomy Organisation (OCTO), which organises large volumes of AI conversations into structured datasets. The company added that the project incorporates multiple privacy safeguards, including the removal of personally identifiable information and the aggregation of data across multiple users.
Positioning ATLAS as an ongoing initiative, Google said future editions will expand to cover more AI use cases, offering researchers, policymakers, businesses and workers a clearer view of how artificial intelligence is reshaping both work and daily life as its adoption continues to accelerate.
