This latest boom in adoption seems to be transcending sectors, which OpenAI is touting as the biggest growth spurt yet. Specifically, messages related to coding have increased 36% across teams outside of engineering and IT. This increase comes on the heels of an alarming internal memo leaked from CEO Sam Altman. He was to be calorously alarmed about the competitive threat posed by Google. The report emphasizes a new line for companies that are implementing artificial intelligence. This is a reflection of the technology’s growing pervasive and essential role in the work environment.
The data that OpenAI has publicly released shows that ChatGPT message volume has increased eight times since November of 2024. This remarkable growth suggests that organizations are increasingly integrating AI into their daily operations. Almost 36% of U.S. businesses have boarded the vessel as ChatGPT Enterprise customers. All of which goes to highlight just how dominant the market share for OpenAI has become.
Workers using OpenAI’s enterprise products said they saved 40 to 60 minutes per work day. These kind of time savings highlight the efficiency powering these tools and how they can dramatically improve productivity. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, flagged a particularly intriguing finding. Three quarters of those surveyed believe that AI enables them to address tasks, including technical functions, that they were unable to address before.
Beyond the general tools themselves, the impact on usage has been huge. Though last year the number of custom GPTs was still small, this year that adoption exploded, growing by 19 times! These custom solutions now make up 20% of the enterprise messages sent on OpenAI’s growing platform. Lightcap commented on this trend, stating, “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.”
OpenAI’s chief economist, Ronnie Chatterji, highlighted the role of consumers in powering economic growth. “If you think about it from an economic growth perspective, consumers really matter,” he said. Chatterji further emphasized the historical role of transformative technologies. He cautioned against being overly optimistic about AI, comparing today’s AI adoption landscape to past innovations like the steam engine. Yet, truly historically transformative technologies like the steam engine are the ones that do the history-making. The true economic dividends come when companies actually use and expand these innovations to their fullest potential.
Despite these positive developments, OpenAI’s leadership faces challenges in managing the company’s $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments. Both Lightcap and Chatterji pointed out a worrisome “growing divide in AI adoption” between knowledge workers and less-skilled labor. Frontier” workers are getting more work done with less. This is in contrast to “laggards,” who are the last to adopt new technology. They often make use of many different tools.
Lightcap proposed one key difference in how the businesses represented see AI through a different lens. He observed, “There are firms that still very much see these systems as a piece of software, something I can buy and give to my teams and that’s kind of the end of it.” This narrow view can limit adoption and innovation for the agency as a whole.
As OpenAI continues to navigate this competitive landscape, its focus on enhancing user experience and expanding its offerings remains crucial. The organization strives to be a catalyst for creating the conditions under which companies of all sizes can best harness AI technologies for real-world use cases.
