How frontier firms are pulling ahead

TLDR

• Frontier firms—those at the 95th percentile of usage—now use 3.5x as much intelligence per worker as typical firms, up from 2x a year ago.

• The gap is about depth, not just activity: Message volume explains only 36% of the frontier advantage; most of the gap comes from richer, more complex AI use.

• Agentic workflows are becoming a frontier marker: The largest advantage shows up in advanced tools, with frontier firms sending 16x as many Codex messages per worker as typical firms.

• Organizations can move toward the frontier: Leading firms measure depth, build governance for production use, invest in enablement, scale what works, and move from chat-based assistance to delegated work with agents.

For many enterprises, the first phase of AI adoption was about access: who had AI tools, how many seats had been deployed, and whether employees were experimenting. That still matters. But access is no longer the differentiator. 

Our latest research suggests the frontier advantage is beginning to compound. Frontier firms are pulling ahead because they use more intelligence per worker, adopt advanced tools more intensively, and embed AI more deeply into workflows.

Today, we’re introducing B2B Signals, a business extension of OpenAI Signals. It provides a recurring measure of how AI is diffusing across businesses, based on privacy-preserving, aggregated signals from enterprise use of OpenAI products, including:

• How deeply AI is being used inside firms

• Which tools and tasks  are most associated with frontier adoption

• Where business use cases are broadening across industries, products, and functions

Note: All analyses in this report are based on de-identified, aggregated enterprise usage data. Message content was classified using automated systems, and no OpenAI employee reviewed individual enterprise, business, or API customer data as part of this analysis.