• 100 School
  • Posts
  • 💯 What professionals are secretly asking AI

💯 What professionals are secretly asking AI

One million Claude conversations just revealed what people ask AI about work.

Author

Max Haining
May 03, 2026

Somewhere this week, 38,000 people opened Claude and asked it whether to take the job, how to talk to their manager, what to do about the 1:1 that went weird.

That's from a study Anthropic published on Thursday, where they read a million Claude chats. Most of the coverage was about the sycophancy bit (Claude over-validating people in 25% of relationship conversations) and how the company is going to fix it in Opus 4.7. but what I keep coming back to is a different finding.

About 6% of all the chats they read were people asking Claude for personal guidance. Not "draft me an email" but "should I take this job", "how do I have this conversation", "what do I do about my manager."

The second-biggest category in the whole pile, behind only health, was professional and career. More than personal finance, parenting, and legal advice combined.

Window into the Future 🔮 

That second-place finish wasn't about people using AI to do their job faster. It was people using it to think about their job. Whether to take the offer. How to handle the awkward 1:1. Whether they're being unreasonable.

Which is a different thing than a tool.

Most people reading this have probably done a version of it. Pasted a Slack thread in to ask what was actually going on. Drafted a job offer pros-and-cons list you wouldn't show a colleague. None of it shows up in a productivity dashboard or makes it onto LinkedIn. And once you've spent enough time talking to Claude like that at work, it starts leaking out everywhere else too.

While most of us are having these conversations on our phones, a Harvey piece I read this week showed me what the opposite looks like. They profiled five law firm leaders who've actually made AI stick at their firms, and the pattern is the same across all five. They're doing it out loud.

  • Esther Bowers at Honigman runs Shark Tank–style competitions where people demo how they're actually using AI to their colleagues.

  • At ArentFox Schiff, things shifted when a respected litigation partner started inviting other partners to watch him use AI on real matters.

  • Pierre Zickert at Hengeler Mueller runs short weekly sessions he calls "just enough time for an espresso". One use case, one coffee, done.

Both studies are real. Most of us are doing the private thing and very few teams are doing the public thing. Neither is wrong on its own. There are conversations you genuinely don't want to have in a Slack channel, and there are conversations that get better when more people see them. The trick is knowing which is which, and most teams haven't thought about it that way yet. (For what it's worth, this is what every team I talk to is trying to figure out. They have the tools, the budget, and a few quiet power users; what they don't have is a way to make any of that knowledge collective. It's the work we keep building 100 School around.)

Want to build your own stuff with AI? 🛠️

Quick one for the people who keep asking how to actually start building stuff with AI when they can't code. The Vibe Coding Bootcamp opens a new cohort Monday May 11th.

Code 100SCHOOL gets you $100 off. Highly recommend.

How to AI 🤖 

Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of ways you could try AI this week that are worth your time:

P.S. Speaking of doing AI out loud, I'm on stage at workforceLIVE this Wednesday May 6th. Come say hi if you're there.

Before you go ✌️

What's an AI use case that's become part of your week? Hit reply, I read every one.

See you next Sunday!

Max 

P.S. Want to make your team & company AI-first? Let us help here.