AI is a frequent flyer in news headlines as it improves, evolves, and infiltrates more and more areas of life. The team at Qualtrics examined data on the 100 most popular uses of AI and how they’ve changed between 2024 and 2025. The results can be a strong source of data for education and further analysis or serve as inspiration on how to use AI for your next project. The team sourced their data from the Harvard Business Review and showed how use cases changed in rankings from 2024 to 2025. Read more here.
The team found that these were the six most popular categories of AI use:
Personal and Professional Support
• 30% (up from 17% in 2024)
Content Creation and Editing
• 18% (down from 23% in 2024)
Learning and Education
• 16% (steady from 2024)
Technical Assistance and Troubleshooting
• 16% (steady from 2024)
Creativity and Recreation
• 11% (down from 13% in 2024)
Research, Analysis, and Decision Making
• 9% (down from 10% in 2024)
Overall, the most popular and fastest-growing category is AI for personal and professional support. Use in this category has nearly doubled in the past year. People are using AI to organize their lives, create schedules, prepare for job interviews, plan workouts, and navigate relationships and parenting challenges. We can see that in 2025, AI for therapy and counseling is the number one use case. This has caused concern among professionals since AI doesn’t think or empathize for humans. As a predictive text model, it’s essentially replying to you with autocorrect. All the same, it seems that many users find it helpful to sort through their thoughts and feelings with reflection prompts and validation from AI.
After personal support, people are using AI for content creation and editing, though the number of people using it this way has declined. They often use AI to refine their tone, structure social media posts, and compose emails.
