How agents are transforming work
OpenAI’s new research paper shows that AI agents, exemplified by Codex, are shifting work from short chatbot interactions to long‑horizon, tool‑orchestrated tasks. Over the past year, Codex adoption has surged across all departments, with non‑technical teams now using it as their primary AI tool. The paper documents increased token usage, longer task estimates, and a rapid rise in non‑developer users. The study highlights how agentic tools enable workers to tackle tasks beyond their traditional roles and suggests a broader future of work driven by autonomous AI agents.
The Core Development
Agentic AI changes the unit of knowledge work from single interactions to delegated, long-horizon tasks. Chatbot interactions are often short and self-contained. Agents can operate independently for minutes or hours while orchestrating tool calls, interacting with environments, and iterating towards solutions. As a result, agents are quickly becoming the most powerful AI tool for work.
Over the last year, we witnessed this transformation first-hand at OpenAI. For the first few months after Codex was released to the public, ChatGPT remained the default AI tool for work within OpenAI. Through August 2025, the average OpenAI worker spent less than 10% of their tokens on Codex. Now, every department, including non-technical departments such as Legal and Recruiting, uses Codex as their primary AI tool for work. This pattern reflects what we believe will be the future of work given the expanded capabilities and accessibility of agentic tools.
Codex adoption grew in tandem with Codex’s capabilities. As Codex leveraged stronger models and new product features, it became capable of taking on an expanding set of productive tasks. Across Individual users, Organizational users, and OpenAI workers, we document four trends over the past year:
Deployment & Availability
Over the last six months, Codex usage has deepened and intensified at OpenAI. Among active internal users, change in combined output tokens rose sharply across departments. Research saw the biggest jump: by June 2026, median use was 56 times higher than in November 2025. Customer Support rose 32 times and Engineering rose 27 times, while Legal grew more gradually but still reached 13 times its November level.
That said, agentic tools can expand what an individual worker can do. For instance, over one-fourth of work done with Codex by workers in business functions was engineering or coding. Agents can lower the cost of moving across task boundaries and help workers do adjacent work that used to require more specialized technical support.
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
People use Codex for longer-horizon work . By May 2026, 80.6% of sampled individual users made at least one Codex request estimated to exceed 30 minutes of human work, 70.2% made one estimated to exceed one hour, and 25.6% made at least one Codex request estimated to exceed eight hours.
Codex became the primary AI tool for every department at OpenAI . Engineering moved first, but Legal, Finance, and Recruiting crossed into Codex being their primary AI tool around April 2026. For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens. Since Codex users tend to use more tokens than non-users, its share of overall tokens is even higher: Codex accounts for 99.8% of weekly output tokens generated within OpenAI.
Non-developer adoption grew especially rapidly, outpacing developer adoption . Since August 2025, non-developer users rose 137x for individual users, 189x for organizational users, and 12x within OpenAI.
Why it matters
The rapid adoption of agentic AI across diverse roles signals a shift toward autonomous, long‑horizon productivity tools, reshaping workforce capabilities and workflow design in the AI industry.