How agents are transforming work

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:

Agents work longer hours on harder tasks

In May 2026, more than 70% of users asked Codex to complete a task 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. 

Adoption continues to move from engineers to the rest of OpenAI

These two patterns together illustrate how Codex has transformed how OpenAI uses AI to do productive work. Across the company, users are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction and are deploying an exponentially growing amount of agentic labor.