What happened
Published 25 June 2026 by OpenAI in collaboration with researchers from Columbia Business School, the Wharton School and Duke Fuqua, this quantitative empirical paper analyses usage data from OpenAI's Codex agentic tool across three populations: individual users, organisational users and OpenAI's own workforce. Key headline findings: 'agentic AI usage is growing rapidly — the number of active users has grown more than fivefold in the first half of 2026, with the most rapid increase occurring outside the initial audience of software developers.' Within OpenAI itself, Codex now accounts for 99.8% of weekly output tokens and has become the primary AI tool for every department including Legal, Finance and Recruiting. More than 10% of users manage three or more concurrent agents weekly; the median OpenAI lawyer generated 13× more monthly output tokens in June 2026 than in November 2025. The paper concludes with implications for productivity, job reorganisation and workforce restructuring.
Why it matters
This is the first large-scale, cross-departmental empirical dataset on agentic AI adoption, offering executives a factual benchmark for how quickly the shift from chat to autonomous agents is occurring across technical and non-technical functions — directly informing workforce planning and AI investment sequencing.
Action needed
Brief your CHRO and CFO on the paper's job-reorganisation section; use the 5× user-growth figure and cross-functional adoption trajectory as a planning assumption for your own 12-month agentic AI rollout timeline.