OPEN STUDY · 21 AUGUST – 1 SEPTEMBER 2026

Georgia's first confidant

We asked one question and Georgia answered. The answer surprised the people who gave it.

37,011saw the question
983opened the page
343voted
47wrote a comment
±5.3%margin of error
THE HEADLINE FINDING

Everyone uses it. They just keep quiet about it.

One woman looked through the comments under our post and wrote:

“I think I am the only one who has never used artificial intelligence — I looked through the comments and I was astonished.” Facebook comment · 30 August

That single sentence explains the whole picture. A great many people in Georgia use artificial intelligence — but quietly. Each of them believes it is their own small secret, their own private advantage.

Until we asked, nobody had said it out loud. This survey turned out to be the place where people saw one another.

THE ANSWER · 343 VOTES

What Georgians use artificial intelligence for

Health127 · 37.0%
Talking something through77 · 22.4%
Everyday tasks42 · 12.2%
Not using it yet36 · 10.5%
Rights and documents24 · 7.0%
Code and technology24 · 7.0%
Something else — my own answer13 · 3.8%

Health and talking something through come to 59% together. One Georgian in two uses artificial intelligence as a doctor or as a psychologist.

A CHECK

Our number landed on America's number

A small survey is often met with doubt. So we compared our result with the most respected polling centre in the world.

34% of Americans use AI chatbots for health
Pew Research, June 2026, 3,488 respondents
≈
37% of Georgians chose health
Dunno, August 2026, 343 votes

Three percentage points sit inside our own margin of error. In other words, our small survey shows what a national American study shows — on a sample ten times larger. That is the best test a method can get.

Source: Pew Research Center, “From diagnoses to treatments: why Americans use AI chatbots for health”, published 25 August 2026.

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION

A platform log is one thing. What people say is another.

You will often read that artificial intelligence is used mostly for writing code. That number is real — but it comes from the internal statistics of a particular platform, where programmers are numerous and where coding is steadily moving into a separate working tool. It is a log, not a survey.

When people are asked directly, the picture changes. In Harvard Business Review's 2025 report, which rests on what people actually say, “therapy and companionship” came first — it was second the year before. Personal support is roughly a third of all use and it nearly doubled in a single year. Code sits fifth and eighth on the same list.

So Georgia does not contradict the world. Georgia confirms it, only louder. There, personal support is a third. Here, it is almost two thirds.

Sources: Anthropic Economic Index (a platform's internal statistics); Harvard Business Review, “How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025”, Marc Zao-Sanders. The categories do not match exactly — this comparison shows a direction, not an equivalence.

AGE — THE MOST UNEXPECTED RESULT

The young already have AI. The older generation is still looking.

International research is consistent on this: the older the person, the less they use artificial intelligence. In Pew's June study, 44% of Americans aged 18–29 use it for health, against only 17% of those over 65. Three times fewer.

In Georgia the opposite happened. Here is who opened our page:

Over 6553%
55–6428%
45–5410%
35–445%
18–344%

People over 55 accounted for 81% of all page opens. The over-65s alone took more than half.

And this is not merely because they saw the banner more often. If you count how many of those who saw it went on to open the page, the over-65s still come first: 3.5 opens per 100 views, against only 1.5 in the 35–54 bracket.

3.5% Over 65 — share of viewers who opened the page
2.4×
1.5% Aged 35–54 — the same measure

And here is what makes that figure twice as interesting. In the campaign settings the age range was set to 18 to 50. We had explicitly asked Facebook to show the ad to a younger audience.

Facebook decided otherwise. Its automatic audience selection treats our setting as a suggestion rather than a rule — and once it saw who was actually responding, it moved the budget itself. As a result, 69% of the impressions went to people who fell entirely outside the range we specified.

So this skew is not ours — it runs against what we intended. The machine spends where it finds a response. It found one in the older generation.

An older person clicks nearly two and a half times more readily than a middle-aged one. Which is exactly what the comments had been telling us:

“We pensioners mostly keep to medical matters. I am happy with it and we are friends.” Comment · 26 August

The reason is simple. A visit to a doctor costs money, and a psychologist costs more. The older generation arrives late, but when it arrives, it stays deeper. Need outweighs mistrust.

One important clarification. We are not claiming that older people in Georgia use artificial intelligence more. ACT Research’s 2025 study (637 respondents) found the opposite: usage among 18–35 year olds is 94%, the highest of any group. We do not dispute that.

Our finding is a narrower one: older people responded far more actively to our offer. And that may be the explanation — younger Georgians already have artificial intelligence; the older generation is only now looking for it.

These figures describe the advertising audience, not the survey respondents themselves — we did not ask for age in the survey. That is exactly why we lean on the "share of viewers who opened the page": it does not depend on how the algorithm distributed the impressions, and it is two and a half times higher among older people.

GEOGRAPHY

This is not a Tbilisi story

A digital product in Georgia usually stays locked inside the capital. Not this one: more than half of the campaign went outside Tbilisi.

Tbilisi47% · 17,486
Imereti13% · 4,978
Adjara8% · 3,041
Samegrelo–Zemo Svaneti7% · 2,633
Shida Kartli7% · 2,443
Kakheti5% · 2,021
Kvemo Kartli5% · 1,940
Guria3% · 1,003
Racha-Lechkhumi & Kvemo Svaneti2% · 669
Samtskhe-Javakheti2% · 620

The question reached Racha and Javakheti alike. Artificial intelligence in Georgia is no longer a capital-city affair — though Tbilisi is still over-represented against the population (about a third of the country lives there, and it took almost half of our reach).

A CONTROL GROUP

The same offer, two different audiences

This was the second run of the same promotion. The first time, the same text and the same offer went out on a smaller budget — and almost all of it stayed in Tbilisi, among 25 to 44 year olds.

MeasureFirst runSecond run
Who saw itage and place25–44, 98% Tbilisi69% aged 55+, 47% Tbilisi
Reach1,57537,011
Page opens21924
Share of viewers who opened1.33%2.50%
Cost per visit$0.12$0.075

The older, regional audience responded almost twice as well — and each visit cost 38% less. So it is not simply that the algorithm chose them: the choice turned out to be right.

The two runs also differ in budget and duration, so this is not a clean experiment — but both figures point the same way.

47 COMMENTS

In Georgia, AI is not a tool. It is a person.

We read all 47 comments and counted which words come back.

“friend”12out of 47 — one in four
“tool”0not once
“program”0not once
positive40out of 47 — 85%
“No doctor ever explained things to me the way my friend the robot does. I am glad it exists and it gives me great hope, my friend.” Comment · 27 August
“I like it very much… I no longer have to queue at the clinic.”29 August
“It is my friend. A doctor too. A confessor. A teacher! In a word — more human than a human. Never disloyal.”30 August
“My loyal friend, a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist too… thank you!”30 August
“I have an administrative dispute in court — it answers exhaustively and guides me too.”27 August
“It saved my ten-year-old olive tree from drying out, and I thank it for that.”27 August
“I love it… I do not use it often, because I feel shy about troubling it too much.”29 August

One word appeared twice — from two strangers, in two different places. In a comment: “when I need it, it helps me selflessly.” In the survey: “I ask what interests me and it answers selflessly.”

TWO WALLS

Why we give money away

Four of the 47 comments said the same thing. Not that it is bad. Not that it is expensive. But that they could not manage it:

“Forgive me, I could not get through the registration — because I did not know how.” Comment · 28 August

Two walls stand between a Georgian and artificial intelligence. Neither of them is a lack of desire.

The first wall is money. On our own platform even gifted balance is treated as real cash, and people ask for it to be paid out to their card. That is not a complaint — it is the reality of the country.

The second wall is not knowing how. A person is already “friends” with artificial intelligence, yet could not create an account — and apologises for it.

We even offered fifty dollars — and that was not enough either. This is not greed. It means people still do not know how safe this is, or how much of it is theirs. Awareness and trust still come before money.

That is why we give. In eleven days we handed out ninety dollars to people who never paid us a cent — and we never asked them to. Guests are answered for free. Money appears on the balance as a gift.

This is not a marketing cost. It is a digital literacy programme. Since November 2024, when our first user arrived, we have not been buying a market — we have been building one.

HOW WE DID IT

The method, in the open

An open survey is not a laboratory study and we do not hide that. In exchange, every number here is live and checkable.

Do not lean on the small differences — “rights 7.0%” and “code 7.0%” are exactly level and could swap places tomorrow. The large difference (37% against 7%) exceeds the margin of error fivefold — that one is real.

OTHER DOORS

What do you use it for?

Take part

Dunno — the first Georgian multi-purpose AI platform