AI and ML
Codex, it's not just for developers, really
A company can learn a lot about the market by looking at its own employees. OpenAI says that its team members are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction, a trend also detected (though less pronounced) among external organizations and users. Instead of one-off ChatGPT prompts, workers are asking Codex agents to tackle multi-step tasks that take long periods of time. And those doing so are increasingly non-developers.OpenAI insists that its findings have implications for other companies, labor researchers, and policymakers, not the least of which would be a brighter revenue picture for OpenAI. Longer running tasks consume more tokens, and to the extent those can be billed, that should help diminish hundreds of billions in debt obligations.
"We find that 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," said company researchers and academics in a paper [PDF] titled, "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex."
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether it incentivizes or encourages employees to use its AI tools – through internal communiques, token allocations, token use leaderboards, or tying tool usage to performance metrics. But we'll take it on faith that when there's enough Kool-Aid on-premises, employees may just develop a taste for it regardless of whether their jobs depend on Kool-Aid consumption.
