According to BitPay–a merchant/consumer Bitcoin processing application—they've been processing >$1B in transactions for the past few years.[1][2] That is just from one centralized service, and there are many other similar ones, private transactions, etc.

So, to answer your question, yes, apparently a lot of people use BTC for conducting actual business.

[1]: https://bitpay.com/blog/bitpay-growth-2017/ [2]: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitpay-reports-processing-over-1-bi...