How people really use AI: The surprising truth from analysing billions of interactions

For the past year, we’ve been told that artificial intelligence is revolutionising productivity—helping us write emails, generate code, and summarise documents. But what if the reality of how people actually use AI is completely different from what we’ve been led to believe?

A data-driven study by OpenRouter has just pulled back the curtain on real-world AI usage by analysing over 100 trillion tokens—essentially billions upon billions of conversations and interactions with large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and dozens of others. The findings challenge many assumptions about the AI revolution.

​​OpenRouter is a multi-model AI inference platform that routes requests across more than 300 models from over 60 providers—from OpenAI and Anthropic to open-source alternatives like DeepSeek and Meta’s LLaMA. 

With over 50% of its usage originating outside the United States and serving millions of developers globally, the platform offers a unique cross-section of how AI is actually deployed across different geographies, use cases, and user types. 

Importantly, the study analysed metadata from billions of interactions without accessing the actual text of conversations, preserving user privacy while revealing behavioural patterns.

The roleplay revolution nobody saw coming

Perhaps the most surprising discovery: more than half of all open-source AI model usage isn’t for productivity at all. It’s for roleplay and creative storytelling.

Yes, you read that right. While tech executives tout AI’s potential to transform business, users are spending the majority of their time engaging in character-driven conversations, interactive fiction, and gaming scenarios. 

Over 50% of open-source model interactions fall into this category, dwarfing even programming assistance.

“This counters an assumption that LLMs are mostly used for writing code, emails, or summaries,” the report states. “In reality, many users engage with these models for companionship or exploration.”

This isn’t just casual chatting. The data shows users treat AI models as structured roleplaying engines, with 60% of roleplay tokens falling under specific gaming scenarios and creative writing contexts. It’s a massive, largely invisible use case that’s reshaping how AI companies think about their products.

Programming’s meteoric rise

While roleplay dominates open-source usage, programming has become the fastest-growing category across all AI models. At the start of 2025, coding-related queries accounted for just 11% of total AI usage. By the end of the year, that figure had exploded to over 50%.

This growth reflects AI’s deepening integration into software development. Average prompt lengths for programming tasks have grown fourfold, from around 1,500 tokens to over 6,000, with some code-related requests exceeding 20,000…