Americans are sending nearly 3 million messages to ChatGPT each day to help them close the wage information gap.

Wage information shapes important decisions: what jobs people apply for, whether they negotiate, and whether a particular career path is worth pursuing. But unlike the price of most goods, the price of labor is often hard to find and difficult to interpret—especially for workers who are early in their careers, switching fields, or moving locations.

AI is a new type of labor-market resource. Rather than requiring a worker to search across multiple websites, interpret scattered salary pages, or ask a socially risky question, a model can synthesize wage information and return a benchmark in seconds. Workers are already using ChatGPT this way, sending nearly 3 million messages per day, on average in the US, asking about wages, compensation, or earnings.

Our latest research report⁠(opens in a new window) looks into how Americans are using ChatGPT to close the wage information gap. They most often come to ChatGPT for two kinds of help: translating pay into a usable benchmark, and understanding what a role, company, career path, or business idea might realistically pay. Among labeled wage-benchmarking messages, pay calculation accounts for 26% of questions, followed by specific role (19%), entrepreneurship (18%), specific role at a company (11%), and occupation or career questions (11%). We determined this through a privacy-preserving analysis that uses automated classifiers and never involves a human viewing individual messages.

The pattern of those questions matters. Occupation-related wage searches are concentrated in fields like arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media; management; healthcare; transportation; sales; and business and financial operations.

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