OpenAI: Visual material production is South Korea's No. 2 ChatGPT work use

OpenAI published a set of ChatGPT usage statistics called OpenAI Signals on October 26, 2026, according to aitimes.com. The data show that in South Korea, visual design and visual material production rose to 7.2% of work-related messages sent from personal ChatGPT accounts in the third quarter of 2026, moving from sixth to second place among work uses within a year.

Document and text editing remained the largest work use in South Korea, accounting for 17.3% of work-related messages in Q3 2026, the same share as in Q3 2025.

The shift in visual work was gradual across the year. Visual design and visual material production was 3.6% in Q1 2026 and 5.8% in Q2 before reaching 7.2% in Q3. In Q3 2025 the category stood at 3.3%.

Other work uses moved in the opposite direction. Language, culture and religion interpretation fell from 7.3% to 5.2% and slipped from second to third place. Computer problem solving dropped from 4.3% to 2.9%, and marketing and PR material development went from 4.2% to 3.8%. Education and career advice was broadly flat, at 3.2% last year and 3.3% this year.

OpenAI classified ChatGPT messages into 165 work activities using the O*NET occupational framework. Across the 74 countries with data in all periods, the top 10 work activities accounted for an average of 56.0% of work messages in Q1 2025, compared with 51.1% in Q3 2026.

The dataset spans Q1 2025 to Q3 2026, and OpenAI also released the raw data. It covers only personal ChatGPT accounts and excludes enterprise accounts and the Codex coding agent.