A company can learn a lot about the market just by watching its own employees. OpenAI says its team members are transitioning to AI agents as their primary form of interaction with AI. Instead of one-off requests in ChatGPT, employees are tasking Codex agents with multi-step, time-consuming tasks. And the people doing this are increasingly non-developers.
A company can learn a lot about the market just by watching its own employees. OpenAI says its team members are transitioning to AI agents as their primary form of interaction with AI. Instead of one-off requests in ChatGPT, employees are tasking Codex agents with multi-step, time-consuming tasks. And the people doing this are increasingly non-developers.
OpenAI emphasizes that this trend is important for all businesses, labor market analysts and governments. But most importantly, it promises better financial prospects for OpenAI itself. The fact is that complex and long-term tasks burn much more tokens. And since each token costs money, the payment for them should help the company pay off its gigantic debts, which are already estimated at hundreds of billions, writes The Register.
“We see that the use of agent-based AI is growing rapidly: in the first half of 2026, the number of active users increased more than fivefold. At the same time, the fastest growth is recorded outside the initial audience of software developers,” the company's researchers noted.
Until August 2025, the average OpenAI employee spent less than 10% of their tokens on Codex. But now, that’s changed dramatically: every department in the company, including non-technical departments like legal and recruiting, uses Codex as their primary AI tool for their work.
Within OpenAI itself, the Codex platform is now used by 97.9% of employees, while in August 2025 this figure was about 40%. In third-party organizations, an increase in popularity was also recorded - it currently reaches 17.3%. As for individual users, there is no need to talk about any significant successes of Codex - the figure is about 0.7%.
OpenAI also notes that since August 2025, Codex usage by non-developers has increased 137 times among individual users, 189 times among organizations, and 12 times within the company itself.
OpenAI acknowledges that programmers are still using the tool more often. However, the company emphasizes that the fact that ordinary office workers have mastered it proves that now anyone can automate their work, analyze data, or even write code without having a technical education.
“In June 2026, the average OpenAI legal employee generated 13 times more token output per month through Codex and ChatGPT than in November 2025,” the study says.
With the number of federal lawsuits filed in the US against OpenAI and its affiliates up 11% in the past six months, the company's lawyers wasted no time in getting to work. With its 13-fold jump in token consumption, OpenAI's legal department appears to have proven the company's main thesis: AI tools really do boost productivity.
