Catching the long tail - by Agatha Yu - a second mind

A friend shared the recent research from Harvard Business Review on how people are really using GenAI in 2025. It was a fascinating read - specifically noticing the trend from utilitarian purposes (e.g. editing text dropped from 4th in 2024 to 45th in 2025 and generating ideas from 1st in 2024 to 6th in 2025) to more emotively driven (Therapy that topped the chat as well as two whole new purpose of "organising my life" and "finding purpose"). If you are actively building experiences and products, it would pique your interest when it comes to understanding the relationship between the economics and technology trajectory. It’s become clear that many of unique values GenAI provides lies in how it is able to generally extremely capable (being able to handle many tasks well - hence the traditional utilitarian tasks of refining text etc etc) but with more depth in systems like memory, it creates a sense of continuity to capture many long tail values that is previously handled by separate nic

A friend shared the recent research from Harvard Business Review on how people are really using GenAI in 2025. It was a fascinating read - specifically noticing the trend from utilitarian purposes (e.g. editing text dropped from 4th in 2024 to 45th in 2025 and generating ideas from 1st in 2024 to 6th in 2025) to more emotively driven (Therapy that topped the chat as well as two whole new purpose of "organising my life" and "finding purpose"). If you are actively building experiences and products, it would pique your interest when it comes to understanding the relationship between the economics