OpenAI Economic Research has released an analysis of agentic AI adoption across the European Union, based on activity from ChatGPT Enterprise and Business accounts. The headline finding is that agentic tools now account for a major share of real work: in the EU sample, Codex and ChatGPT Work generate more than half of all output tokens among ChatGPT Enterprise customers. The report defines small and medium businesses as organizations with 200 or fewer associated users.

The same shift shows up in smaller companies. Since May 2026, weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work among EU small and medium businesses grew more than eightfold, with growth in every member state. Adoption is far from uniform, however: the share of enterprise output tokens produced through Codex and ChatGPT Work ranged from 22% in Slovenia to 85% in Lithuania, and the kinds of tasks people bring to ChatGPT also differ by country.

The report also measures intensity at the top of the distribution, defining frontier firms as the top 10% of firms by output tokens per active user. In September, frontier firms in the EU generated more than four times as many output tokens per active user as typical EU firms. Even so, frontier firms outside the EU produced more than twice as many output tokens per active user as frontier EU firms. EU-based firms accounted for only 10% of frontier firms globally, a share the report calls low given the EU’s larger share of registered companies worldwide.

The authors read these figures as evidence of a gap between broad adoption and deep use. Their stated opportunity for the EU is to convert broader adoption into more intensive use, stronger businesses, higher productivity, and concrete benefits for workers. The path they describe involves helping firms move beyond experimentation, giving workers the skills and confidence to use AI, and making advanced capabilities more accessible and affordable. CFO Sarah Friar frames the moment similarly: Europe is entering an era of tools that carry out tasks for people, more than half of EU enterprise and business AI use now involves them, and small business users have grown eightfold, while plenty of room remains for AI use to grow across the region.