From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work

Organizations are expanding both where they use AI and what they ask it to do. Enterprise AI is moving from assistance to execution, yet not all firms are making that transition at the same pace. Frontier firms—those in the top 10% of AI usage each month—now generate 8.3× as many output tokens per active user as typical firms. The measure is a proxy for depth of use, and the widening gap appears alongside greater adoption of capabilities that connect agents to company context, tools, and repeatable workflows.

Today we are publishing two complementary studies that examine this shift. Enterprise Signals leads with a practical view of agentic AI across OpenAI’s enterprise customer base, including what frontier firms are doing differently and where agentic work is spreading. The companion working paper, How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT ⁠ (opens in a new window) , examines how adoption grows across companies, roles, and levels of seniority.

Together, the studies point to a practical enterprise agenda: connect agents to the context and tools needed to complete valuable work; establish clear permissions, review, and governance; and help employees turn effective individual workflows into shared ways of working.

The opportunity for leaders is to close the frontier gap by extending agentic workflows beyond engineering and turning successful individual use cases into repeatable practices across the organization. By connecting agents to company context and tools, with clear permissions, governance and human review, firms can move from assistance to execution.

Among the U.S. public companies studied in How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT ⁠ (opens in a new window) , enterprise adopters had stronger financial measures compared to non-adopters. They held more assets, employed more workers, and had higher levels of R&D investment. Read together, the reports suggest that access alone may not be enough to scale AI. Complementary investments in continuous employee learning, shared workflows, data infrastructure, and governance can support broader and deeper adoption.

These reports reveal five key insights on how organizations are putting AI to work:

Enterprise use is becoming more agentic. As of June, Codex generated 64% of combined Codex and ChatGPT output tokens among enterprise customers, suggesting that agents are enabling a shift toward more substantive, delegated work.

The frontier gap is widening. Frontier firms—those in the top 10% of AI usage each month—now generate 8.3× as many output tokens per active user as typical firms, up from 2.6× in January.