OpenAI says AI agents are already transforming how its employees work
Follow UsOpenAI says AI agents are already changing how its employees work.
The company says Codex is now one of the main AI tools used across every department.
"For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens," OpenAI said.
OpenAI says AI agents are already changing how its employees work. The company says Codex is now one of the main AI tools used across every department. Employees are relying on them to complete longer and more complex tasks. OpenAI says that among daily active users at the company, the heaviest users ask Codex to run many hours of agent work in a single day.
SurveyIn a post on X, OpenAI said, “Work at OpenAI is being transformed by agents, in every department.” It added that people are using Codex for “more complex, longer-running, and increasingly cross-functional” work. “Our internal usage offers an early look at how agentic tools may reshape work as they become more capable and broadly available.”
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In a blog post, OpenAI explained that AI agents are different from chatbots. A chatbot usually answers one question at a time. An AI agent can work on a task for minutes or even hours. It can use different tools, solve problems step by step, and keep working without constant human input.
OpenAI said ChatGPT was the main AI tool used by employees after Codex was launched. That changed as Codex improved. Today, it is the primary AI tool across every team. “For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens,” the AI company said.
By May 2026, around 81 per cent of sampled individual users had asked Codex to complete at least one task that would take a person over 30 minutes. Around 70 per cent gave it work that would take over an hour. Around 26 per cent assigned tasks that could take more than eight hours.
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The company also saw strong growth among non-developers. Employees in Legal, Finance and Recruiting now use Codex regularly. Many use it for coding, automation, data analysis, debugging, and other technical work.
“Our results demonstrate what unfolds when people have broad, low-friction access to capable agentic tools: as the tools improve, people use them for longer, more complex, and more cross-functional work. As time goes on, this is likely to be what the future of work looks like,” OpenAI said.
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