Visual design is now 10.6% of Indonesia's ChatGPT work messages, up from 2.7%
New open data from OpenAI shows design work became the second-largest work use of ChatGPT in Indonesia in 18 months, while programming halved. Brand teams now have a public measure of how much design work runs through AI.
On October 26, OpenAI released a new cut of its Signals data. It sorts the work people bring to ChatGPT into 165 standard work activities, drawn from the US O*NET framework, across nearly 100 countries, quarter by quarter from early 2025 to the third quarter of 2026. Anyone can download it under a CC BY 4.0 license. It covers individual ChatGPT plans only, so enterprise accounts and Codex are left out.
We pulled Indonesia's rows and compared them with its neighbors. OpenAI's systems classify each message automatically after removing identifying details, and the published shares carry added statistical noise to protect individual users, so read small gaps between countries with care.
Design jumped and code dropped
In the first quarter of 2025, "create visual designs or displays" made up 2.7% of Indonesia's work-related ChatGPT messages. It ranked 10th. By the third quarter of 2026 it was 10.6%, second only to editing written documents, which slipped from 17.2% to 17.0%. Preparing informational or instructional materials, second in early 2025 at 7.2%, dropped to third at 7.0%. No other work activity in Indonesia gained more than 1 percentage point.
Programming went the other way, from 6.1% of work messages to 3.0%. Developing marketing or promotional materials barely moved, from 4.6% to 4.7%.
Work is a large share of how Indonesians use ChatGPT overall. In September 2026, 40.3% of messages from Indonesia were work-related, against 45.3% in Singapore and 33.1% in Malaysia.
Thailand leads the region and Indonesia is next
Design grew in every neighboring market we checked. By the third quarter of 2026, visual design was 13.0% of work messages in Thailand, 9.3% in Malaysia, 7.8% in Vietnam, 7.5% in Singapore and 6.4% in the Philippines. In the United States it was 7.6%. In Thailand, design now outranks editing written documents, at 13.0% against 12.8%. Malaysia's share for marketing and promotional materials also rose, from 4.9% to 6.0%. Of the 6 Southeast Asian markets we compared, Indonesia is second, behind Thailand. Singapore rose from 1.5% to 7.5%. Programming's share fell in all of them.
OpenAI's own reading of the data is that use is spreading out. Across the 74 countries observed in every quarter, the 10 most common activities fell from an average 56.0% of work messages in early 2025 to 51.1% in the third quarter of 2026. Indonesia went slightly the other way: its top 10 rose from 53.8% to 54.3%.
Design work is moving to personal AI accounts
Design is now the second-largest kind of work Indonesians bring to ChatGPT, and this data counts only individual plans. For a marketing team, that means some design work is likely happening in accounts the company does not manage.
That creates 2 risks. The first is brand consistency: visuals made outside approved templates drift from the guidelines. The second is data: product shots and unreleased campaign material uploaded to a personal account sit outside company control.
Read the coding drop with one limit in mind: the data leaves out Codex and enterprise plans, so some coding may have moved to those tools.
3 checks for brand teams
- Find out where your visuals are made. If the answer is personal AI accounts, decide whether to bring that work into a company plan with your brand assets loaded.
- Put brand rules where the work happens. Load templates and approved colors and type into the tools your team uses, and add a review step before anything ships.
- Use the data yourself. The dataset is open, so your team can pull its own country and activity cuts and compare them with what you see in-house.