How People Use ChatGPT: Conversation-Level Evidence from India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Pakistan

Abstract

Public understanding of how people use LLM-based conversational AI assistants comes primarily from aggregate platform reports by OpenAI and Anthropic, which apply fixed taxonomies and inferred demographics to hundreds of millions of users and release only summary statistics that outside researchers cannot re-analyze. We provide a complementary, conversation-level view: complete ChatGPT exports comprising 202,590 conversations from 1,252 users across India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Pakistan, paired with self-reported age and gender and spanning December 2022 to February 2026. To our knowledge this is the first conversation-level, demographically grounded comparison of ChatGPT use across multiple non-Western countries. We ask what these users use ChatGPT for (purpose), what they talk about (topics), and how they engage with it (mode of interaction), using the platform's own classifiers, unsupervised topic discovery, and a thematic analysis of expressive conversations. Personal use accounts for 55-64% of conversations in every country and coursework is about as common as work, so workplace productivity describes a minority of use. Unsupervised topic discovery surfaces country-specific uses that the OpenAI taxonomy folds into generic categories: health and wellness in India and Brazil, Urdu-English translation in Pakistan, current affairs in Nigeria, religious questions in Nigeria and Pakistan, and self-reflection in Brazil. Over three years, the share of conversations that seek information declined only modestly and the share that delegate a task did not grow, while conversations in which users express themselves rose from a few percent to roughly a fifth or more in every country. The same product is thus attached to different local needs in each country, and understanding what adoption means requires conversation-level, country-sensitive measurement alongside global aggregates.