OpenAI published two complementary studies examining how enterprises are shifting from using AI for assistance to delegating tasks to agentic systems. The first, Enterprise Signals, analyzes agentic AI usage across OpenAI‘s enterprise customer base. The companion working paper, How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT, examines adoption patterns across companies, roles, and seniority levels.

Key findings from the reports: As of June 2024, Codex generated 64% of combined Codex and ChatGPT output tokens among enterprise customers, signaling a shift toward substantive delegated work. The frontier gap is widening: firms in the top 10% of monthly AI usage now produce 8.3× as many output tokens per active user as typical firms, up from 2.6× in January. Frontier firms also use advanced capabilities more often — 21% of weekly active users at frontier firms use Plugins versus 9% at typical firms, while OpenAI‘s internal usage shows 95% of active employees use Plugins weekly.

Codex adoption is spreading beyond engineering into knowledge-work functions. Since February, weekly active enterprise Codex users grew 108× in legal, 41× in sales, 41× in recruiting, and 26× in marketing, compared with 5× in engineering. The studies found that early-career employees use AI more than senior employees — six months after adoption, early-career workers sent 13 more messages per week than executives — contradicting survey-based findings that suggest leaders use AI more.

The reports highlight that access to models alone may not be sufficient to scale AI adoption. Complementary investments in continuous learning, shared workflows, data infrastructure, and governance can support broader and deeper use. The opportunity for leaders is to close the frontier gap by extending agentic workflows beyond engineering and turning successful individual use cases into repeatable organizational practices.