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A new OpenAI research paper shows how AI agents are transforming work, enabling longer, more complex tasks and expanding productivity across roles.
A new Economic Research paper measuring Codex’s economic potential at the frontier.
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:
Nearly a quarter of all Codex requests are for tasks that would take a person more than one hour to complete1. As Codex’s capacity for independent long-context work improved, users shifted from short interactions toward more difficult tasks with longer horizons.
The chart below estimates the share of individual users that crossed four human-time thresholds: tasks that would take a person more than 30 minutes, more than one hour, more than four hours, and more than eight hours2. From December 2025 to May 2026, the share of users who made a request that was estimated to correspond to work that would take a person more than 30 minutes rose to 80.6%. The share making a request that would take a person more than one hour rose to 70.2%. The share requesting work that would take a person more than eight hours grew the fastest from a low base.