OpenAI released new data on Monday showing enterprise usage of its AI tools has surged dramatically over the past year. ChatGPT message volume has grown eight times since November 2024, and workers report saving up to an hour daily.
The findings arrive a week after CEO Sam Altman sent an internal memo about the competitive threat of Google. The timing underscores OpenAI’s push to reframe its position as the enterprise AI leader amid mounting pressures. While close to 36% of U.S. businesses are ChatGPT Enterprise customers compared to 14.3% for Anthropic, the majority of OpenAI’s revenue still comes from consumer subscriptions, a base threatened by Google’s Gemini. OpenAI also competes against Anthropic, whose revenue comes mainly from business sales, and increasingly against open-weight model providers for enterprise customers.
The AI giant has committed 1.4 trillion dollars to infrastructure commitments over the next few years, making enterprise growth essential. “If you think about it from an economic growth perspective, consumers really matter,” said Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, during a briefing. “But when you look at historically transformative technologies like the steam engine, it’s when firms adopt and scale these technologies that you really see the biggest economic benefits.”
OpenAI’s new findings suggest adoption among larger enterprises is growing and becoming more integrated into workflows. Organizations using OpenAI’s API are consuming 320 times more “reasoning tokens” than a year ago, suggesting companies are using AI for more complex problem-solving. That increase in reasoning tokens, which correlates with increased energy usage, could be expensive and unsustainable long term.
Beyond raw usage metrics, OpenAI is also seeing changes in how companies deploy its tools. Use of custom GPTs jumped 19 times this year, now accounting for 20% of enterprise messages. OpenAI pointed to digital bank BBVA, which regularly uses over 4,000 custom GPTs. “It shows you how much people are really able to take this powerful technology and start to customize it to the things that are useful to them,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer.
These integrations have led to meaningful time savings. Participants reported saving 40 to 60 minutes per day with OpenAI’s enterprise products, though that may not include time spent learning the systems or correcting output. The report found enterprise workers increasingly leverage AI tools to expand their capabilities, with three quarters saying AI enables them to do things they couldn’t do before. OpenAI reported a 36% increase in coding-related messages outside of engineering, IT, and research teams.
While OpenAI drove home the idea that its technology is democratizing access to skills, more coding by non-experts could lead to more security vulnerabilities. When asked about this, Lightcap pointed to OpenAI’s recent release of its agentic security researcher Aardvark, which is in private beta, as a potential way to detect bugs and exploits.
OpenAI’s report also found that even the most active ChatGPT Enterprise users aren’t using the most advanced tools available, like data analysis or reasoning. Lightcap mused that fully adopting AI requires a mindset shift and deeper integration with enterprise data, and that adoption of advanced features will take time.
Lightcap and Chatterji also stressed a finding that showed a “growing divide in AI adoption,” with some “frontier” workers using more tools to save more time than “laggards.” “There are firms that still very much see these systems as a piece of software,” Lightcap said. “And then there are companies that are really starting to embrace it, almost more like an operating system. It’s basically a re-platforming of a lot of the company’s operations.”
OpenAI’s leadership framed this as an opportunity for laggards to catch up. For workers training AI systems to replicate their work, however, “catching up” might feel more like a countdown.