On July 23, 2026, Google released the AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0. ATLAS stands for Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study. It is the first report in an ongoing project that tries to answer a simple question: what are people really doing with AI? Instead of guessing or running surveys, Google looked at how people actually use its products.
Researchers studied 14.7 million anonymous conversations from the Gemini app, Google AI Mode, and the Gemini API, collected over two weeks in April 2026. Personal details were stripped out first, and any group smaller than 10 users was thrown away. The team then sorted these chats into more than 800 jobs, 4,000 work tasks, 300 home activities, 150 countries, and 140 languages.
AI has spread widely but not deeply. People use it in jobs covering 88% of U.S. employment, yet the typical job only uses AI for about 21% of its tasks. Most use is teamwork, not replacement: fewer than 10% of work chats try to finish a task from start to end. Higher pay strongly predicts heavier use. Outside work, AI touches activities filling 98% of Americans' waking hours.
Blue-collar workers use AI more than expected. Mechanics and technicians send photos and video to diagnose problems at over twice the normal rate. Boring paperwork is a surprise winner too: questions about government services show up almost twenty times more often than time-use data would predict, and nearly half of medical, legal, financial, and government questions happen outside business hours. English is only about a third of all conversations worldwide.
ATLAS suggests the story of mass job replacement is far ahead of the evidence. What the data shows instead is millions of people quietly using AI as a helper, both at work and at home.
Full report can be reached at ai.google/static/documents/GoogleATLASv1.pdf.