What 81,000 People Actually Want from AI (And What It Means for Your Chiang Mai Business)
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI, recently published findings from a major study interviewing 80,508 people across 159 countries and 70 languages. They asked a simple question: what do you actually want from AI?
The answers matter for anyone running a business in Chiang Mai, because they reveal not what AI vendors are selling, but what real people are trying to solve. And the picture that emerges is more grounded, more human, and more immediately useful than most of the headlines about AI would suggest.
Here is what the data shows, and what it means if you are operating an SME in northern Thailand.
The top thing people want: time back
According to the research, time-saving was the most cited benefit, mentioned by half of all respondents. Not intelligence. Not automation in the abstract. Time.
But the follow-through is telling. When Anthropic asked people what they would do with that recovered time, the answers were not about more work. People described picking up children from school, cooking with family, reading books, and being present. The full findings make clear that productivity was rarely the end goal. It was the means to a better life outside work.
For Chiang Mai business owners juggling operations, customer service, admin, and marketing, this is the honest case for AI adoption. Not the transformation pitch. The practical one: what are you doing right now that a tool could handle, so that you get an hour back today?
The second most wanted thing: help doing better work
“Professional excellence” was the largest single category of AI vision, cited by nearly one in five respondents. People wanted AI to handle routine tasks so they could focus on higher-value strategic work and complex problem-solving.
This maps directly onto what most Chiang Mai SME owners already feel. The work that matters, the relationships, the judgment calls, the creative decisions, tends to get crowded out by the work that just has to get done. Drafting the same reply for the tenth time. Compiling a report no one reads. Translating a document. Formatting a quotation.
AI does not replace the parts of your job that require you. It creates space for them.
Entrepreneurs are the most optimistic group in the study
Among people who reported real economic gains from AI, independent workers and entrepreneurs stood out sharply. Nearly half reported concrete economic empowerment, compared to 14% of institutional employees.
People in lower and middle income countries also showed significantly more optimism than those in Europe or North America, framing AI as a capital bypass mechanism: a way to start and grow businesses without the funding, hiring infrastructure, or specialist access that would otherwise be required.
That framing is directly relevant here. Running a business in Chiang Mai often means operating without the specialist depth available to larger companies. No in-house marketing team. No dedicated accountant on staff. No full-time content writer. AI does not fix all of that, but it compresses the gap.
If you are still weighing up the fundamentals, our guide to starting a business in Chiang Mai covers what the city actually offers operators at this stage.
The biggest concern: unreliability
The most common worry in the study was AI unreliability, raised by more than one in four respondents. People were concerned about hallucinations, inaccurate outputs, and the verification burden that comes with having to fact-check everything an AI produces.
This is legitimate, and it is something to take seriously rather than dismiss. AI tools produce confident-sounding output that is sometimes wrong. For any business task where accuracy matters, particularly anything involving numbers, legal compliance, or customer-facing claims, human review is not optional.
The practical implication is not to avoid AI, but to use it in the right parts of your workflow. AI is strong on drafting, structuring, translating, summarising, and generating options. It is not a substitute for judgment, verification, or domain expertise.
Translation and bilingual content is one area where the time saving is immediate. If you need professional support alongside it, see our translation services directory.
The second biggest concern: jobs
Concern about job displacement and economic disruption was raised by more than one in five respondents, and it was the single strongest predictor of negative overall AI sentiment in the study.
For business owners, this concern plays out in two directions. There is the question of what AI means for your own team, and the question of what it means for your own competitive position.
On the team side, the honest answer is that AI will change some job functions significantly. The businesses that handle this well will be the ones that help their staff use AI to do better work. Getting your team structure right first matters — our piece on employee turnover costs is worth a read before making any staffing decisions.
On the competitive side, freelancers and small business owners were the most exposed group in the study, simultaneously benefiting from AI and feeling precarious because of it. They are both users of the tools and, in some sectors, competing against them. That tension is real and worth taking seriously.
A pattern that should inform how you adopt AI
One of the more useful findings in the study is about where AI’s benefits are strongest.
Tradespeople reported some of the highest rates of learning benefits from AI, yet almost none reported signs of cognitive atrophy. The researchers concluded that AI’s benefits may be strongest when learning is volitional, as opposed to within institutional structures where AI is more likely to be used as a shortcut.
Applied to a business context: AI tools produce the best results when the person using them already has judgment in the area. A business owner who understands their customers will use AI to write better marketing copy. Someone with no feel for their audience will produce polished nonsense faster.
This is an argument for building AI into your workflow as a complement to your expertise, not as a replacement for developing it.
What Southeast Asian users specifically want
In Southeast Asia, respondents showed lower concern levels around governance, surveillance, and abstract AI risk compared to Western regions, indexing more strongly toward practical concerns about reliability and economic impact, and toward a vision of AI as a tool for creating opportunity rather than managing complexity.
That framing, AI as opportunity engine rather than productivity optimiser, is a useful one for Chiang Mai businesses thinking about where to start. The question is not how to plug AI into an existing workflow. It is where AI opens up something that was not previously accessible: a new market, a new capability, a new customer segment you could not serve before.
Where to start if you have not already
The Anthropic data points toward a few high-value entry points for SMEs.
Writing and communication is the most immediate. Drafting emails, social media posts, customer replies, and internal documents are areas where AI can produce a strong first draft that you edit and approve. The time saving is real and the verification burden is low.
Research and synthesis is the second. If you regularly need to understand something new, a regulation, a market, a competitor, or a technical process, AI is a fast first-pass research tool. Treat its output as a starting point, not a final answer.
Translation and bilingual content is a significant opportunity in Chiang Mai specifically, given the daily need to communicate across Thai and English. AI translation is not perfect, but for internal communications and first drafts it dramatically reduces the time cost of operating bilingually.
Operational templating is the fourth. Standard operating procedures, onboarding documents, quotation templates, and routine correspondence can all be drafted with AI assistance and then refined once rather than recreated repeatedly.
The Anthropic study did not find a world divided into AI believers and sceptics. It found people organised around what they value, watching AI develop while managing both hope and anxiety at once. The most common pattern was not optimism or pessimism, but a set of genuine tensions: the same tools that save time can also increase pace; the same tools that empower entrepreneurs can displace workers in adjacent roles.
For Chiang Mai business owners, the most productive way to engage with that complexity is to start with a specific problem rather than a general position on AI. What is the task in your business that takes the most time relative to the value it produces? That is the place to test a tool. Measure the result. Go from there.
The businesses that will gain the most from AI in the next two years are not the ones that adopted it earliest. They are the ones that adopted it most deliberately.
