By Anna Desmarais
Publication Date: 2025-12-10 12:01:00
Published on
Millions of people are using artificial intelligence (AI) agents for learning or productivity in their personal lives, in what researchers say is the first study on their adoption.
AI agents are like online assistants that can plan and execute complex tasks with little human supervision, based on a user’s request. In 2025, many of the world’s biggest AI companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI launched or expanded their own digital assistants.
A Harvard University researcher teamed up with one such company, Perplexity AI, to examine data from the startup’s AI browser and digital assistant, Comet, which launched in July 2025.
The researchers analysed hundreds of millions of queries to understand how the agent was being used and published their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, online this week.
The researchers classified users based on their jobs and the ways they typically used the agent.
People who started using AI agents early on, as well as users from wealthier, more highly educated countries were more likely to “adopt or actively use the agent,” the researchers said.
More than 70 per cent worked in a digital or knowledge-intensive field, for example academia, finance, marketing, or entrepreneurship, the study found.
The fields with the fewest AI agent users were those that…
