You knew agents were the buzziest topic of 2026, but new data shows that they're dramatically changing the way workers use AI — and not just in terms of productivity and automation.
On Thursday, OpenAI unfurled new economic research that showed how knowledge workers are adopting AI agents. OpenAI centered the research around its Codex app, since it has such high-fidelity data on usage. Perhaps most interesting was the data OpenAI shared in the paper about the Codex usage patterns inside OpenAI, which could serve as a canary in the coalmine showing how power users across the enterprise will soon be using these kinds of tools.
Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, told The Deep View, "The paper you have today is trying to analyze the data to tell the world what's happening with AI... We wrote this paper about Codex, and [we're] really opening up for the first time an economic study of agents. We'll later have other papers on different parts of the AI stack that we think are important."
Here are the most consequential takeaways from the report:
Agents replace chatbots: Inside OpenAI, every department now uses Codex as its primary AI tool, with the average worker now generating 85% of their output tokens (the results from prompts) in Codex rather than ChatGPT. The bottom line is that you can have Codex go query ChatGPT for you, as well as use a lot of other tools. It can also carry out multiple queries and/or tasks at the same time.Units shift from minutes to hours: Of the users sampled in the study, 70% have made at least one Codex request that would take the equivalent of more than one hour of human work, and 25% have made a request that would take the equivalent of 8 hours of human work. The big deal here is that power users are rapidly adapting to the idea of giving agents work and letting them churn on it in the background.Job functions expand: The most profound insight from the study was that it discovered AI empowered workers to take on new tasks and workloads that would have previously been outside their domain of expertise. So it wasn't just AI automating work, but empowering workers to participate in adjacent aspects of work that essentially made them more valuable.
It's not the only signal that employees are gravitating towards agents. Data by KPMG published earlier this week finds a similar trend: Employee adoption of AI agents has already reached 68%, the firm found, as only 2% of leaders report significant pushback on AI deployments.
Our Deeper View #
Hat tip to OpenAI for using its economics team to mine usage data and share insights on the impacts that AI is having on work, employment, and worker adoption of these tools. If you're not familiar, the same team that produced this paper also produces OpenAI Signals, which publishes data, insights, and stories of real-world AI usage. The data released clearly has benefits to OpenAI, as it would like more people to adopt Codex to stay competitive in its race with Claude Code. It also generates more token usage than ChatGPT, which naturally supports the company's bottom line. One of the ways OpenAI could gain even more credibility and brand trust would be to publish data that doesn't have clear economic benefits for the company, but provides ample benefits to society by helping the public track and understand the latest AI adoption patterns.