From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work

OpenAI published two reports examining how enterprises are adopting AI, revealing that organizations are shifting from using AI to answer questions toward using it to execute work tasks through agents. The frontier gap between the highest-performing firms and typical firms has widened significantly, with top-performing firms generating 8.3 times more output tokens per user than typical firms as of June, up from 2.6 times in January. Frontier firms are more likely to use advanced capabilities like Plugins and skills that connect AI agents to company data and tools, enabling longer multi-step tasks. The reports show that agentic AI adoption is spreading rapidly across knowledge work functions like legal, sales, recruiting, and marketing, and that early-career employees use AI more than senior executives despite earlier surveys suggesting the opposite.