In the short time since it launched in November 2022, ChatGPT’s popularity has exploded. The large language model-based chatbot from developer OpenAI has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history to date.
With such a widescale adoption of AI came a cascading impact every facet of business—including the office of finance.
“I think the biggest change AI will bring is the ability to augment the office of finance to do more with less, just like CPM (corporate performance management) has done the last decade-plus,” said Dominic DiBernardo, Partner and CPM Practice Leader for Citrin Cooperman. “I certainly don’t think it replaces finance people, just makes them more valuable. They will continue to be able to help the company get deeper insights that are actionable.”
In this article, will delve into several statistics that illustrate the scale and impact of ChatGPT and explore use cases for the tool within finance teams, along with sample prompts and guidelines for mitigating risk.
Top ChatGPT Statistics at a Glance
1. ChatGPT surpassed 100 million active users in less than two months.1
2. ChatGPT received 1.6 billion visits across desktop and mobile devices in June 2023.1
3. ChatGPT has an average site visit duration 8.2 times higher than the web-wide average of 54 seconds.2
4. OpenAI’s computing costs to run ChatGPT are estimated to be $100k daily and $3M monthly.3
5. AI models like ChatGPT may consume all available data for training and run out of new data as soon as 2026.4
How Many Users Does ChatGPT Have?
As of August 2023, estimates show that ChatGPT has over 100 million users, but the adoption rate of ChatGPT is hotly contested. In June, its number of users declined for the first time, falling 10% from the previous month.
Adoption of ChatGPT also skews younger—fewer than 17% of 30-to-44-year-olds use ChatGPT themselves—and the rate is even lower for other adults.
ChatGPT’s user count cements it as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching the milestone just two months after it launched. So how many people are actually using ChatGPT?
6. Over 13 million unique daily users visit ChatGPT.5
7. ChatGPT exceeded 1.8 billion visits in both April and May 2023, its highest monthly totals yet.1
8. ChatGPT’s count of 1.6 billion visits in June 2023 was around 10% lower than in May—the first decrease in users that ChatGPT has seen since its launch.1
9. The average daily user count is between 53 and 60 million users as of June 2023.1
10. The largest growth spurt of ChatGPT’s user count was between December 2022 and January 2023, when the bot’s user count grew 132% and added around 350 million users.1
ChatGPT Demographics
Now that you know how many people are using ChatGPT, let’s take a look at exactly who those users are.
By Country
ChatGPT access is available in most countries, but not all. Some countries have even banned access to the tool. Among countries with ChatGPT access, usage varies widely, and there are top users around the globe in different hemispheres.
11. ChatGPT API access is currently supported in 163 countries.6
12. At least 15 countries have an outright ban on ChatGPT in place as of July 2023, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Cuba.7
13. ChatGPT was initially banned for privacy concerns in Italy, but access was reinstated in April 2023. Other European countries have also considered a ban.8
14. The top five ChatGPT-using countries make up around one-third (30.38%) of all users.1
15. In June 2023, the U.S. had the largest share of ChatGPT users globally at 12.12%.1
16. India had the second-most ChatGPT users globally in June 2023, at 7.61% of traffic.1
Japan (4.17%), Brazil (3.32%), and Columbia (3.16%) were the third, fourth, and fifth biggest global ChatGPT users, respectively.1
By Generation
Users of ChatGPT span all age groups, but are most concentrated between Generation Z and Millennials.
With the youngest and most populous demographic in the workforce adopting AI tools at increasingly higher rates, companies will need to contend with their employees’ increased desire for AI at work.
18. Out of 466 people surveyed who are at least remotely familiar with ChatGPT, 18-to-29-year-olds were three times more likely to use the tool to generate text than those in the 65+ age group (15% vs. 5%, respectively).9
19. Among 1,000 U.S. adults who participated in a January 2023 survey, 9% of those aged 18-29 admitted to using AI tools “very often.” This is around twice as much as those who used the tools “very often” in the 45-64 group (4%) and the 65+ group (5%).9
20. Just 6% of all ages use the tools “very often.” 9
21. Nearly half (44%) of those aged 65+ surveyed in January 2023 said they never used AI tools like ChatGPT. 19% weren’t sure if they had or not.9
How Are People Using ChatGPT?
As ChatGPT continues to evolve, people will continue to discover new ways to use the tool. The company behind the chatbot, too, will likely develop revised iterations and novel features that continue to change how we all think about our day-to-day work.
For instance, the code interpreter plugin OpenAI announced in July 2023 allows the tool to conduct data analysis and create visualizations based on a data set that you provide.
Here’s how people currently use ChatGPT.
22. The average visit duration for ChatGPT users in June 2023 was 7 minutes and 27 seconds.1
23. ChatGPT has 12 initial plugins: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier. There are more than 70 total third-party plugins available.6
24. Approximately 94% of ChatGPT traffic is direct, 4% comes from site referrals (mostly social media) and 1% comes from organic search.1
25. Organic traffic makes up 99.93% of ChatGPT’s total monthly traffic figures. Paid traffic is only 0.07%.1
26. Among social media sites, YouTube drives the most traffic to ChatGPT, with around a 60% share.1
27. YouTube drives more social media traffic to ChatGPT than all other referral channels combined.1
With the bulk of social media traffic to ChatGPT coming predominantly from YouTube, it’s likely that people are consuming content that teaches them use cases and skills with ChatGPT, taking learning into their own hands.
How Finance Teams Can Use ChatGPT to Their Advantage, Plus Sample Prompts
“From a finance perspective, one of the things that’s cumbersome [...] is simply responding to questions about financial positions and responding to questions about the current status of a forecast—just questions about how financial data comes together,” said Vena’s CTO Hugh Cumming during a keynote at Excelerate Summit 2023.
“This is one of the use cases that we see will come quickly with the assistance of technologies like ChatGPT, which is simply the ability to respond to stakeholders.”
With ChatGPT, you can give it a data set and ask it questions about that data to quickly discover trends and new patterns. You can even have ChatGPT instantaneously create data models through the code interpreter plugin.
This is a dream come true for any finance professional still dealing with high volumes of manual tasks.
There are many ways finance professionals can leverage ChatGPT. For example, you might ask it to analyze a particular dataset and provide you with a summary of the data. You might also ask it to simplify a sales forecast into digestible language that you can present to leadership.
But for ChatGPT answers to be as tailored to your needs as possible, you should keep a few considerations in mind:
- Get specific with your ask. Tell the tool precisely what you want it to do, including as many details as possible to give context to your query.
- Think of who would give you an answer in the real world. ChatGPT can mimic the style of individual people if those people have a written presence on the internet before September 2021. It can also impersonate the tone of a specific profession, like a financial advisor or a market researcher.
- Continue asking questions. ChatGPT’s language modeling allows you to converse with it. Asking follow-up questions can give more context to what you need and allow the tool to develop more specific answers for your query.
Let’s look at some ways finance teams can use ChatGPT to level up their work game.
1. Get Smarter About How You Use Excel
ChatGPT can help finance professionals move faster in Excel, the method of strategic analysis most commonly used by finance teams—even amid the growing list of technologies available today.
Research from Dresner Advisory Services found that 56% of organizations are still using spreadsheets as a company-sanctioned strategic tool for analysis. Another 41% saw them more as a necessary evil—but still used them.
ChatGPT can:
- Create complex array formulas from scratch: ChatGPT can create complicated formulas that perform several calculations at once with more speed and accuracy.
- Format and structure large data sets quickly: ChatGPT can scan unformatted data and turn it into a digestible presentation like a table or a graph.
To use ChatGPT to create Excel spreadsheets, you’ll need to feed it a dataset and give it a clear set of instructions. For Excel formulas, you won’t need as much instruction, but you’ll need a clear idea of what you’d like the result to look like, such as in the prompt below.
- Sample prompt: “Please create an Excel formula that uses the INDEX and MATCH functions together in an array with the SUM function to perform a SUMIFS-like functionality.”
2. Automate Routine and Mundane Tasks
Pouring over spreadsheets can be enlightening but also draining.
Tasking ChatGPT with data analysis can help speed up the time it takes finance teams to generate insights. Of course, ChatGPT isn’t a complete replacement for any FP&A software, but a compliment to finance teams by allowing AI to extract value from their data faster.
You can also use ChatGPT for routine tasks like answering questions that might come from senior leadership, like explaining the trends and implications from the previous quarter’s sales.
- Sample prompt: “Analyze this table showing last quarter’s sales and summarize three key trends.”
3. Relay Knowledge Confidently to Other Teams
One of the most important roles a finance team has is business partnering—surfacing the data generated within finance to other teams to inform decision making.
But communicating the meaning of that data to a non finance audience can be challenging, especially when you’re so close to the data.
Because ChatGPT can mimic specific individuals’ style of speech, one potentially time-saving use case for finance teams is to ask it to tailor your message to your target audience for you.
For example, you can instruct it to structure results for certain audiences, like sales or marketing teams, or any relevant party outside of your finance team.
- Sample prompt: “I have a cash flow forecast showing projections for the next quarter. Please provide a summary that explains this forecast in simple terms for someone without prior knowledge of corporate finance.”
Is ChatGPT Safe To Feed Company Data Into?
With so many new ways to expedite workflows, it’s tempting to incorporate AI tools like ChatGPT into every facet of your business. But finance professionals should be cautious about adopting any new technology without a thorough understanding of the risks involved.
Natural language processing technology like that used in ChatGPT is continually drawing on data to train itself and improve its output. That creates the possibility for any sensitive, confidential or proprietary data to become accessible or searchable to others, including competitors. All ChatGPT conversations are stored on OpenAI’s servers and used to train future iterations of the bot unless you specifically opt out.
Like many web-based apps, ChatGPT is vulnerable to bugs, meaning any sensitive data you provide to the tool could be at risk in the event of a leak. In May 2023, Samsung banned employee access to ChatGPT after an engineer unknowingly leaked sensitive internal source code when they used it in a conversation with the chatbot.
If you or anyone on your finance team intends on using ChatGPT to speed up tedious tasks, ensure you’re following these best practices:
- Use discretion when deciding what information to feed the tool
- Always stick to company data security best practices
- Avoid sharing identifying information
- Verify the accuracy of any output produced by ChatGPT
Start Exploring the Advantages of AI for Finance
ChatGPT is as good an indicator as any that the world is changing fast.
As more companies start to use AI tools like it in their day-to-day operations, early adopters will gain a competitive advantage over those slow to adopt, developing the policies and employee skills necessary to unlock the full potential of this technology.
“Implementing AI technologies often necessitates organizational and cultural changes,” said Harjot Ghai, Chief Operating Officer at Delbridge Solutions. “Some CFOs may be wary of the disruption and resistance that can accompany these changes. Overcoming this hurdle requires effective change management strategies, including clear communication, training and involvement of key stakeholders throughout the AI adoption process.”
Beyond ChatGPT, there are already AI-powered tools available to finance professionals that enable them to delve deeper into their data.
Vena Insights, for instance, uses Microsoft’s best-in-class AI and machine learning technology from PowerBI to help you get answers to complex business questions faster.
Sources:
1. Similarweb (2023). chat.openai.com. Retrieved from https://www.similarweb.com/website/chat.openai.com/
2. Contentsquare (2023). 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark. Retrieved from https://contentsquare.com/insights/digital-experience-benchmark/
3. Twitter post from Tom Goldstein, December 6, 2022, 12:34 pm. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/1600196995389366274?lang=en
4. Epoch (2023). Will we run out of data? An analysis of the limits of scaling data sets in Machine Learning. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf
5. U.S. News & World Report (2023). ChatGPT Sets Record for Fastest-Growing User Base - Analyst Note. Retrieved from https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2023-02-01/chatgpt-sets-record-for-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note
6. OpenAI (2023). Supported countries and territories. Retrieved from https://platform.openai.com/docs/supported-countries
7. Insider Monkey (2023). 15 Countries That Banned ChatGPT. Retrieved from https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/15-countries-that-banned-chatgpt-1165549/
8. Associated Press (2023). OpenAI: ChatGPT back in Italy after meeting watchdog demands. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-openai-data-privacy-italy-b9ab3d12f2b2cfe493237fd2b9675e21
9. YouGov (2023). Daily Survey : ChatGPT. Retrieved from https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/p3j2eqjz5c/tabs_ChatGPT_20230124.pdf
