The EU’s next chapter in AI is agentic

Across the EU, businesses are expanding how they use AI through agentic tools. People are moving beyond asking questions to using agents to carry out tasks from planning through completion. Our latest report from OpenAI Economic Research examines how agentic use is growing across enterprises and small businesses, focusing on differences in usage intensity and the kinds of work people do with ChatGPT. 

We have found that, among ChatGPT Enterprise customers, agentic use already represents a substantial share of activity⁠. In our EU sample, Codex and ChatGPT Work now account for more than half of output tokens.

The agentic shift extends to small and medium businesses. Since May 2026, weekly active users of Codex and ChatGPT Work among EU small and medium businesses grew more than eightfold, with growth across every member state.

But we also found that the EU’s adoption of agentic AI is far from uniform. Among the ChatGPT Enterprise accounts in our sample, the share of output tokens generated through Codex and ChatGPT Work ranged from 22% in Slovenia to 85% in Lithuania. The differences across countries extends beyond the intensity of agentic use. The kinds of work people bring to ChatGPT also vary across countries.

The takeaway is that EU frontier firms use AI much more intensively than typical EU firms, but still trail firms at the global frontier. In September, frontier firms in the EU generated more than four times as many output tokens per active user as typical EU firms. Even so, frontier firms outside the EU generated more than twice as many output tokens per active user as frontier EU firms. EU-based firms also represented only 10% of the frontier firms globally, which is low considering that the EU accounts for a higher share of registered companies globally⁠(opens in a new window).

Sarah Friar, Chief Financial Officer, OpenAI