How do we really use AI? Not the way you might think

We tend to talk about AI as a tool for getting work done. Conventional wisdom says it helps developers, speeds up writing, and keeps documents organized. But is that really how people use AI models day to day? The latest OpenRouter report suggests that… not really.

OpenRouter is a platform that supports over 300 models from 60 providers. More than half of its traffic comes from outside the United States, which gives a global snapshot of behavior. The report doesn’t include conversation content—only metadata. The report’s authors analyzed over 100 trillion tokens generated by hundreds of models and billions of interactions, which makes it possible to see patterns, how long interactions last, and the types of tasks that repeat millions of times.