Who Pays for Generative AI? Work, Household Budgets, and Subscription Demand

Abstract

Personal demand for generative AI connects workplace adoption to household budgets. We study this connection in eleven weekly ConsumerInsight surveys from South Korea, comprising 8,800 records and a main occupational sample of 4,440. Joint work and personal use is associated with substantially more widespread willingness to allocate a monthly AI budget. After adjustment for demographics, occupation, firm size, workplace policy and use frequency, the mixed-use differences reproduce in nine later waves at 11.3 percentage points relative to no work use and 8.5 points relative to work without personal use. A seven-configuration decomposition shows a further 4.6-point difference when study joins work and personal uses. The monetary ranking also holds in the full occupational sample after covariate adjustment and every admissible completion of incomplete amounts: at KRW 10,000, the later-wave mixed-use differences are bounded below by 4.2 and 2.6 points. Affirmative subscription-expenditure records are concentrated among work users, who account for 92.2% of these records against 73.8% of the comparable core sample. A net-value framework explains how benefits across purposes enter personal budgets relative to free and organizational alternatives. The findings establish purpose breadth as a substantial dimension of AI financing demand and place household budget decisions alongside organizational adoption in explaining the formation of a paying market.

Author abstract from the research manuscript. Typography and line breaks have been normalized; the linked source may show a different manuscript version.