A study found that office workers are rapidly increasing their use of ChatGPT to perform specialised work in other fields beyond their existing jobs.

The analysis is that AI is changing how work is done and how roles are divided before it changes the scale of corporate employment.

A report by Axios, citing OpenAI research, said that an analysis of more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT conversations by U.S. business users found that about 44 percent of job-specific requests were related to work mainly performed in other job categories. Tasks commonly performed across most jobs, such as writing emails or managing schedules, were excluded from the analysis.

Ronnie Chatterji (로니 채터지), OpenAI's chief economist, said, "With the spread of AI, boundaries between jobs are likely already becoming more flexible."

The analysis found users handled tasks previously done by specialists by using ChatGPT, such as producing marketing materials, fixing software errors, performing financial calculations or interpreting various regulations.

By job category, the change was most pronounced among customer service workers, designers and human resources (HR) staff.

About 75 percent of job-specific requests in these categories were counted as related to work performed in other specialised job categories.

Researchers said it was difficult to judge from this study alone whether AI created new work or supported people in performing existing tasks more easily. They added it was also not confirmed whether such use leads to productivity gains, better work quality or changes in hiring methods.