On 10 November, OpenAI published a study it carried out with Upwork, a freelance work marketplace. The study compares Upwork job postings with what people use ChatGPT for.

OpenAI’s blog does not give exact figures for budgets, hours, task pairs or content writing. These come from a Unite.AI news article summarising the full report, The Rebundling of Freelance Work in the AI Age. The site says AI wrote the article and its editors checked it. The companies based the study on their own data.

Budgets are larger, hourly rates almost the same

The report classes a job as AI-related when the posting asks for AI skills, requires AI tools or seeks to improve AI-generated material. Unite.AI reported that budgets for such fixed-price jobs were 52.4 per cent higher than for comparable non-AI jobs. The gap in posted hourly rates was only 1.5 per cent. The comparison matched postings within the same subcategory and month.

In hired hourly contracts, AI-related work logged 40.6 per cent more hours in the first 90 days. The figure covers contracts with recorded hours. The data runs to April 2026.

The report sees the gap as a sign that project scope and the amount of work bought matter more than the hourly rate. OpenAI puts it more cautiously: larger budgets may partly reflect broader work. Unite.AI said the figures show associations, not cause and effect.

AI-related jobs also combine tasks in new ways. On average, 8.4 per cent of task pairs in AI postings were previously rare, compared with 2.4 per cent in other postings. Between the first half of 2023 and the second half of 2025, tasks in AI postings became about 45 per cent more diverse. OpenAI said this is equivalent to about 21 equally common tasks instead of the previous 15.

ChatGPT use alone does not explain the changes

The clearest difference is in content writing. Unite.AI reported that it made up 14.5 per cent of sampled ChatGPT conversations between January 2025 and June 2026. It accounted for 1.3 per cent of Upwork postings in the first half of 2026, and its share fell by about 31 per cent in a year. Video and animation, by contrast, made up 1.0 per cent of conversations but 10.0 per cent of postings.

The comparison of work categories set ChatGPT’s share in the second half of 2025 against Upwork’s share in the first half of 2023. In 43 of the 63 categories studied, work that was relatively common in ChatGPT lost share on Upwork over this period, while less common work gained share. The pattern did not hold in the remaining 20. ChatGPT use alone does not explain changes in freelance demand, OpenAI said. The analysis measures category shares, not whether total demand on the platform grew.

The ChatGPT data was a sample of 36,896 conversations from consumer accounts. The GPT 5.6 Luna model classified the conversations using at most the first five user messages. The two datasets have not been linked, and neither represents the whole labour market. OpenAI also notes that the comparison reflects how people use ChatGPT today, not everything AI could do.