Adoption Overview
OpenAI released an economic research paper on Thursday measuring the internal adoption of its agentic AI tool, Codex, since its public release. As of June 2026, 97.9% of active OpenAI users were operating through Codex, and the platform accounted for 99.8% of all output tokens generated within the company.
Departmental Usage
Engineers began shifting the majority of their work to Codex by December 2025. Non‑technical departments—including Legal, Finance, and Recruiting—crossed the majority‑use threshold around April 2026. The average lawyer or recruiter now generates more than 85% of their output tokens on Codex, while engineers generate 99% of theirs.
User Activity Metrics
By May 2026, 80.6% of sampled individual users had made at least one Codex request estimated to replace 30 minutes of human work, 70.2% had made a request estimated to replace one hour, and 25.6% had made a request estimated to replace eight hours. Users in the 99th percentile were regularly generating over 60 hours of Codex agent turns per day by June 2026.
Growth Rates Across User Groups
Non‑developer adoption outpaced developer adoption across all user groups. Since August 2025, the number of non‑developer individual users rose 137‑fold, organizational non‑developer users rose 189‑fold, and internal OpenAI non‑developer accounts grew 12‑fold. Among organizational users, Codex now accounts for 63.3% of output tokens, whereas individual users generate 16.5% of their tokens through the platform.
Departmental Token Growth
Research departments experienced the steepest increase, with median output tokens rising 56‑fold from November 2025 to June 2026. Customer Support output tokens grew 32‑fold, Engineering 27‑fold, and Legal 13‑fold over the same period.
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