OpenAI has published two reports tracking how enterprises are adopting agentic AI, finding that firms in the top 10% of usage now generate 8.3 times as many output tokens per active user as typical firms, up from 2.6 times in January, the company said on 12 August 2026.
The reports, Enterprise Signals and a companion working paper titled How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT, found that Codex generated 64% of combined Codex and ChatGPT output tokens among enterprise customers as of June, which OpenAI said reflects a shift toward more substantive, delegated agentic work rather than simple question-answering.
Frontier firms also use advanced capabilities such as Plugins and skills far more often. Weekly active users at frontier firms used Plugins 21% of the time and skills 19% of the time, against 9% and 3% respectively at typical firms. Internally, 95% of OpenAI's own employees use Plugins weekly.
Agentic adoption is spreading well beyond software engineering. Since February, weekly active enterprise Codex users grew 108 times in legal, 41 times each in sales and recruiting, and 26 times in marketing, compared with a fivefold increase in engineering. At Virgin Atlantic, OpenAI said, engineering teams now use Codex to refactor legacy code in 30 minutes rather than two weeks.
Among the US public companies examined in the working paper, enterprises that had adopted AI showed stronger financial measures than non-adopters, holding more assets, employing more workers and investing more heavily in R&D.
The research also found early-career employees use AI more heavily than executives, sending 13 more messages per week six months after adoption, contrary to survey-based findings that typically show higher usage among senior leaders.
